WPI’s superstar researchers Lindsay Lozeau and Todd Alexander never pictured themselves as cofounders of a company that is poised to change the way the medical community considers stopping infections.
Yet here they are.
Their company, AMProtection, has gone through a few changes and pivots to arrive at this point—starting down the road to bring to market a urinary catheter with antimicrobial peptides that will reduce infections without increasing antibiotic resistance. Eventually such a device could save patients the painful and sometimes lethal infections that can happen from catheters.
Alexander and Lozeau at work in the lab.
“We have gone through iterations,” says Lozeau. “We don’t want to become a catheter company, although that’s our first application. We want to be an R&D company that grows in Massachusetts, stays in Massachusetts, and creates jobs here. We both agree on that. It’s nice to finally have that unified idea of what we want to do.”
“It’s not that we agree every time on everything,” says Alexander, “but at the end of the day, I respect Lindsay and she respects me.” Neither takes that lightly. Both spend long hours in the lab and have a relentless drive to build a company. “It’s really important to have a shared vision for what you want to do,” says Lozeau. “Once we wrote that down, it was easier for us to describe what we were doing.”
Product development isn’t a speedy process, nor should it be. But before a product even becomes an idea, it’s often just as a whisper. How long does it take to go from concept to reality? Lozeau and Alexander share some insight to the twists and turns that give an idea some legs.
--By Julia Quinn-Szcesuil
