The Anonymous Widower

Rules For Success? – Respimat

Two guys approached me for funding, as they were doing unusual things in the field of fluid dynamics. As I understood a fair bit about that from my past at ICI and at the time I lived in the family home of Osborne Reynolds, I decided to fund them in their work.

The first product was an aerosol valve that instead of working with HCFCs, worked with compressed nitrogen.  Actually, we always talked about using purified air.  (Sad, but the general public believes nitogen is poisonous!) We spent a lot of money on IPR and then sold the whole idea to Johnson & Johnson at a small profit. Whether they ever used it in a real product, I don’t know.

We were then approached by a major pharmaceutical company, who asked if we could use our technology to power a metered-dose-inhaler for asthma drugs and they gave us a near six-figure grant for research.

We couldn’t, but the two guys came up with another idea that worked.

Strangely, our contract with the pharmaceutical company, gave them no legal rights to the device, if we decided to go elsewhere.  So we put in nearly half a million of our own money to complete all the IPR and obtain the patents. 

When the patents were granted, we sold the device and all the rights to Bohringer Ingelheim, the German pharmaceutical company, who called it Respimat.

It had been a project with a long and difficult history, that somehow managed to limp to a successful conclusion.

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March 9, 2011 - Posted by AnonW | World | Rules For Success