Hartford Business Journal

www.HartfordBusiness.com • June 29, 2020 • Hartford Business Journal 7 that ultimately allowed for greater oil extraction, MacDougall said. "You can infer flow rates, injec- tion profiles, all sorts of things," he said. "It gives you a real-time pic- ture of what's going on in the well." As is still the case today, MacDou- gall was in charge of the science, while Sanders, who has a chemistry degree, handled business development. "It works really well," Sanders said of their intermeshing roles. Qorex's first sales came quickly, with systems installed in Canada and the Middle East. Annual revenue eventually reached approximately $5 million, the co-founders said. In 2012, a private well-monitoring company called Petrospec, based in Alberta, Canada, acquired Qorex. The price was never disclosed, and Sanders declined to provide it for this story, but he said the deal produced an almost 10-time return on Alberta Green Ventures' initial investment. That first success has been a motivator for the duo's continued business partnership. "The opportunity to bet on your- self and a trusted team has got to be one of the most exhilarating feelings I have experienced," MacDougall said. The next venture MacDougall and Sanders stayed on with Petrospec until around 2017, when they sensed their sec- ond opportunity. Convening the same five-person team in Rocky Hill, they launched LuxPoint, which aimed to leverage their sensor expertise to provide more advanced monitoring of the electric grid, with the aim of enabling clean-energy technologies and detecting faults in power cables. Ultimately, the venture would be shorter-lived. LuxPoint hadn't yet reached commercial revenue when MacDougall and Sanders dissolved the company's Connecticut busi- ness registration earlier this year. They said a Texas investor now controls the company, and is work- ing to develop patents and com- mercialize products. The two co- founders retain some equity in it, but are not involved in operations. While the outcome was not as splashy as Qorex's, LuxPoint could still find future success, Sanders said, so he doesn't view it as a failure. "It's still viable, it's actually a re- ally good product," he said. One of the main reasons the two decided to part with LuxPoint is that the medical device market had captured their attention. A quick pivot The MacDougall-Sanders team — which includes Yi Yang, principal scientist, and technical staff mem- bers Frank Birritta and Scott Nelson — are now working over the next six-to-nine months to double Lum- eda's staff and raise more money. The optical device they're work- ing to modify, under the terms of an exclusive license, was first de- veloped by Roswell Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, New York, where PDT originated in the 1970s. It's a flexible optical surface ap- plicator, made of silicon mesh with optical fiber placed in several chan- nels. The device would be placed on the wall of the lung during surgery to optimize the delivery of the light to the tumor site. The idea is to kill as many remaining cancer cells as possible to reduce the chance that they later spread through the bloodstream to other parts of the body, such as the brain or liver. MacDougall and Sanders, while technically talented, know they aren't medical experts, so they're in the pro- cess of recruiting a scientific advisory board, which will include clinicians from Hartford HealthCare and Yale. Sanders says the Roswell device is promising, but he thinks his team can improve on the technology. "PDT hasn't had a lot of good engi- neering done," he said. "We are one of the first pure photonics companies to apply our engineering to [PDT]." You can count on us! Our flexible lending solutions and experienced team may be just what your business needs. 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