Westford Imaging Company Primed For Growth
Gov. Deval Patrick, left, visits Lightlab Imaging Inc. in Westford on Tuesday as CEO David Kolstad, center, and State Rep. Jim Arciero, D-Westford, right, look on.
David Kolstad, president and CEO of LightLab Imaging Inc. in Westford, wants to change the way doctors study and treat heart disease, America's number one killer.
And his company is getting help from the state to do it.
The company uses light to create images of the arteries in the heart and hopes its technology will one day compete with ultrasounds and MRIs.
By using light, Kolstad said, images of the heart produced by his company's machine have 10 times the clarity and are about 20 times faster to produce than more traditional techniques.
"We believe our technology will provide better and more easily understood information for clinicians to both select the appropriate therapies, guide those therapies, and evaluate the effectiveness of those techniques," Kolstad said.
Gov. Deval Patrick also believes in the technology, which was invented at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Patrick visited Lightlab this week to tour the company's 28,000-square-foot research and manufacturing site on Technology Drive in Westford.
Grant Awards
Lightlab has been awarded $188,000 from the Massachusetts Life Sciences Initiative to help hire about 20 new employees this year.
"Bit by bit and brick by brick, that is how we rebuild our economy," Patrick told a gathering of about 75 Lightlab employees during his tour on Tuesday. "It's companies just like this one that are about innovation, good ideas and the technology of tomorrow that will help us get there."
The company is a subsidiary of Goodman Co. Ltd., a Japanese medical device company. Lightlab already sells imaging products in Europe and Asia and has recently completed clinical trials to offer the technology in the United States.
Receiving approval from the Food and Drug Administration will open the company up to a half-billion dollar market for coronary artery imaging in the United States. But even without FDA approval to sell here, the company is expanding.
In the fourth quarter of the 2009, Lightlab added about 5,000 square feet of engineering space at its Westford complex and a dozen employees. Kolstad said he expects to add another 20 to 30 employees in 2010.
A graduate of Worcester Polytechnic Institute with an MBA from Dartmouth, Kolstad said he's committed to staying in Massachusetts. The talent pool for new employees and easy transportation access make it a perfect fit for his company. Plus, he said the state support from the Life Science Initiative has a "direct economic impact," helping his company expand its employee base.
The Life Science Initiative began in 2008 with a commitment to invest $1 billion over 10 years. Since then, about $180 million in public funding has been used to leverage $680 million in private investment, according to the center.
The $188,000 grant for Lightlab is part of $25 million in tax incentives that were distributed to 28 life science companies around the state in December.
Patrick said during his tour that the Life Sciences Initiative is important to "galvanize our international reputation as the principal center for biotech and life sciences."
To attract companies to the state, Patrick said he's got to "get out there" and meet with industry leaders to market the state.
He's done that with a trip this year to California and a trade mission last year to China, he said.
Despite the efforts, the economy is taking its toll on businesses.
Patrick said he was "disappointed" to learn this week that Charles River Laboratories of Wilmington would be closing its Shrewsbury labs and laying off about 300 people that work there.
"You're going to get some wins, but you're not going to get all the wins," Patrick said. "Nonetheless, we've got to get in the game and stay in the game and engage these companies."
Patrick said the true grade of success will not be based on individual companies, but on the net job loss or creation in the state because of the initiative.
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