New ideas for local medical device maker

Aubrey Group team tackles medical equipment with gusto

Orange County Register, March 28, 2006

The laboratory benches are crammed full of electrical gear, control panels, pressure sensors, temperature gauges, plastic tubes with blood-colored water surging through them, centrifuges, computers, tangles of wire and exposed circuit boards.

Vytas Pazemenas, president and founder of the Aubrey Group in Irvine, looks at the mess and sees an adventure that's worthy of a swashbuckling sea captain. Not clutter. Not disorganization.

Potential.

And a dash of danger.

In a modern world where continual change seems inevitable - and scary for those who can't adapt fast enough - thinking of innovation as an adventure can be invigorating.

That's the approach Pazemenas took when he founded his medical-equipment company in 1974 and named it after Jack Aubrey, the sea-captain hero of a series of novels that were popularized by Russell Crowe's 2003 movie "Master and Commander."

Like Jack Aubrey, Pazemenas needs a clear view of what the future can bring, but he doesn't have to be a great visionary who dreams up bold new concepts.

The Aubrey Group's work mostly comes through the front door because it's a designer and manufacturer of medical equipment under contract to other companies. Under that arrangement, it has helped create devices that pump blood for patients awaiting heart transplants, monitor patients for early signs of congestive heart failure and control irregular heartbeats, known as fibrillation.

Often, the adventure for Pazemenas and his company is the challenging journey from the customer's vision to a real-world product.

"You have to fight the laws of physics," Pazemenas says, describing how Aubrey's engineers confront physical limitations of electronic systems and the human body. Something will turn out to be "too small, too far, too weak" for the original plan, Pazemenas says, so innovative engineers must find a new way to proceed.

For example, an implantable sensor that Aubrey is developing could measure pressure in a blood vessel, in the eye or in the brain, but it's no bigger than a grain of rice, with no battery, so its power must come from an antenna outside the body. That power source has to be strong enough to run the implanted circuitry, but no stronger than what the human body can endure -10 milliwatts of power per square centimeter, Pazemenas says.

A power source worn on the belt would be close enough to run a sensor in the abdomen, but not one in the head, he says. Senior systems engineer Milan Trcka proposes powering eye- and brain-pressure sensors from a shoulder-mounted device.

Similarly, the variable nature of the human heart posed the main challenge for Aubrey when it developed the power supply for an anti-fibrillation device for Epicor Medical Inc. Because the heart is a moving mass of muscles and nerves often swaddled in fat, it would bounce power back to the control system unpredictably.

Once, at a time when Aubrey thought its work on the controller was nearing completion, a power surge overloaded a capacitor, destroying it in a puff of smoke and flame. "It was a catastrophic failure," said Trcka, but Epicor needed a working system promptly, so he redesigned the system on the spot.

"I had to fix it right then and there," he says.

Through crises and obstacles such as those, Aubrey has developed about two dozen medical products over the past 12 years. Among them:

An FDA-approved heart-assist device for Thoratec Corp. of Pleasanton that can pump blood while a transplant patient awaits a new heart.

A mattress pad for Hoana Medical Inc. of Honolulu that contains pressure sensors allowing a computer to calculate a sleeping patient's heart rate. It's currently undergoing clinical trials.

A blood processor, still under development for Mission Medical Inc. of Fremont, that will cut the time for blood plasma donations by two-thirds.

A weight and voice-recognition monitor for Alere Medical Inc. of Reno, Nev., that lets its nurses watch for early signs of congestive heart failure among thousands of PacifiCare patients nationwide.

That range of work puts Aubrey on the leading edge of industrial design for the medical-device industry in Orange County, says Timothy Jemal, executive director of the local branch of the AeA, an electronics industry trade group.

"They're creators, developers and industrial designers, all in one - that's why I'm impressed with them. They fill an important niche," he says.

A look at the bookshelves in Pazemenas' office reveals what the medical-equipment business is like for him - sometimes tough, sometimes amusing, often unpredictable, always technically demanding:

"Patton: A Genius for War"

"The Dilbert Principle"

"Thriving on Chaos"

"Physicians' Desk Reference"

"Quantum Mechanics"

But, most importantly, 18 volumes of the Jack Aubrey seafaring novels of Patrick O'Brian.

Those tales of courage and resourcefulness give Pazemenas' company not only its name, but also its inspiration for day-to-day innovations.

"Every project is an adventure," Pazemenas says. "It's sometimes stormy, with many unknowns."

"The basic laws of physics are like the sea, the basic thing in nature that you have to deal with. You have to overcome the limitations that nature gives us."