NanoScreen picks Charleston for expansion

Daniel Dechert boarded a plane for Switzerland about three months ago, unsure how the pharmaceutical industry would react to his company's newest product. His uncertainty was short-lived. Almost as soon as he unveiled the small titanium device at a Geneva trade show, Dechert felt he had a surefire winner on his hands, as drug researchers from around the world clamored to see it.

"Their eyes got so big," said Dechert, president and chief executive of NanoScreen LLC, a Charleston-based designer and manufacturer of specialized lab equipment and supplies. "It was a very, very good experience, and I'm not sure if I'll ever have an experience like that again."

It has been that kind of a breakout year for NanoScreen, which, after celebrating its second anniversary in August, is quickly making the transition from obscure California startup to emerging Lowcountry technology firm with a blue-chip client list and some serious growth plans. Those plans began to take shape last week when Dechert announced he is moving the rest of his manufacturing operations from Los Angeles to a new $7 million, 25,000-square-foot complex, including a full-service lab, under construction off Clements Ferry Road in Berkeley County.

The decision capped what he said was a successful two-year test run in Charleston for the young business. "I'm very committed to South Carolina," Dechert said. As part of the first of three proposed expansions, NanoScreen also is looking to add at least 50 workers to its 25-employee payroll in Charleston over the next few years, he said.

"In an era where the trend among competing companies is to downsize and outsource, NanoScreen is expanding the company and bringing proprietary production and manufacturing techniques ... in-house," he said.

Dechert describes NanoScreen as a "liquid-handling" specialist that targets drug-research firms, from small biotechnology labs to all of the so-called Big Pharma titans, with its three main lines of business. The company's cone-shaped "pipette" tips, now made on the West Coast, are plastic devices that hold precise volumes of liquids for injection into tiny test vials. The company also manufactures the aluminum dispensers that use vacuum-powered syringes to draw liquids into the disposable polypropylene tips. Lastly, NanoScreen fixes and refurbishes the robotic machinery that controls the movement of the dispensers.

Dechert is now preparing to move the business into new territory, bolstered by the reaction at the September trade show. The next-generation dispenser NanoScreen introduced in Geneva is being tested at two field sites. The company has high hopes for the device, calling it "a revolution in miniaturization."

"The unit crams 1,536 needlelike syringes and plastic tips onto a 3.5-by-5-inch plate of titanium through tiny holes drilled through the metal, a feat once thought impossible from an engineering standpoint, Dechert said. "It's a dense format," he said. The advantage of the new dispenser is that it will allow drug researchers to test four times as many samples as they can now, saving time and reducing storage costs, Dechert said.

He hopes to present the industry with findings from the field tests next year and bring the product to market in 2007. "We're the only company in the world to have this technology," he said.

Designers had all but given up on increasing beyond 384, the number of syringes they could squeeze on a single dispenser, Dechert said. A bigger head was not a solution because it would not be compatible with the industry's standard 3.5-by-5 test grid. Materials posed another problem. While aluminum dispensers now available hold up fine with several hundred holes drilled into them, they are not suited structurally to handle many more. Dechert decided to experiment with titanium, which is harder and less flexible. His brother Mike, a master machinist at NanoScreen, made it work. "He makes things happen," Dechert said.

The Decherts were schooled in the art of precision machining by their father and grandfather in California. The NanoScreen CEO stumbled into the obscure business of pipette-making after going to work for a big health-sciences company. He found himself out of a job when the firm outsourced its manufacturing work and closed his plant. Sensing an opportunity, he and a few other engineers decided to start producing their own plastic tips. They formed NanoScreen in 2003.

The company then started machining dispensers. It branched out again by offering to fix the robotic liquid-handling machines, both for others and for its own use. Dechert said the refurbishing business has done wonders to raise NanoScreen's profile because the company's name is prominently featured on refurbished equipment. Those machines are then resold at a fraction of the cost of a new unit to small biotech outfits and academics.

Dechert said he is now consulting with top-level researchers to parlay NanoScreen's knowledge of the automated equipment into yet another business sideline. "We will be introducing our own robotic instrument," he said.

NanoScreen's decision to test the waters in South Carolina was influenced largely by the fact that Dechert was commuting for a spell to the West Coast from Charleston, where his wife had found a good job at a local hospital. But other factors came into play, he said. As an owner of a small startup company, Dechert said, he was disenchanted by the high costs of running a business and living in Southern California.

Ernest Andrade, who works to lure more high-tech firms to Charleston as head of the city's of Digital Corridor initiative, pressed the matter. "We hope to leverage the kind of success that NanoScreen has had here to attract other business," Andrade said.

In hindsight, the relocation decision was easy, Dechert said. Citing one example, he said emergency shipments can be delivered overnight to most NanoScreen customers as easily from Charleston as L.A. Also, the Lowcountry is easy to sell to prospective employees and visiting customers. "It's not hard to convince people this is a great place to live," Dechert said. "That's a great asset."