Bio-Intervention Specialists.

• Author: Peterson, Eric
• Position: [small biz] TECH STARTUP

COMPANY

BIO-INTERVENTION SPECIALISTS

(a dba for Aion Partners LLC)

INITIAL LIGHT BULB: In the fall of 2008, longtime health-care executive and consultant Tom Boyer connected with Mike Peters and Dave Faulder of Bailey-based Strategic Resource Optimization.

"They explained to me this disinfecting technology they had developed for use in the Rocky Flats cleanup," Boyer says. "My reaction was, 'What are you guys doing in health care?' The answer at the time was, 'Nothing.'"

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Boyer quickly set out to change that. "I thought this could be a transformative technology for disinfecting in health care," he says. He negotiated a 25-year license with Strategic Resource Optimization to use the technology in health care and founded Bio-Intervention Specialists (Bio-IS) with three partners in early 2009.

IN A NUTSHELL: Dubbed Electro-BioCide, Bio-IS's technology holds the promise of revolutionizing the disinfection of hospitals and other health-care facilities.

The industry's status quo is "the four horsemen of disinfectants: bleach, quaternary ammonia, peroxide and peracetic acid," says Boyer, now the company's CEO. "They make up 95 percent of all the disinfectants in use today. They basically poison the organism to death." The problem: "Because of the power of mother nature to mutate, if you do not entirely poison that organism, the organism can learn to survive against that substance."

Some microbes have mutated to feed on ammonia, Boyer adds. "We have a tsunami of infectious disease that is beginning to show up that human beings have no defense against." Some of the most prevalent of such diseases are hospital-acquired infections such as "super-bug" MRSA; the Centers for Disease Control estimates that 1.7 million people are infected per year, 100,000 of whom will die from it.

"That's more deaths than breast cancer, car accidents and AIDS combined," Boyer says. "And we're disinfecting the same way today as we did it in 1972."

Instead of merely poisoning the organism, Electr-BioCide, now approved for use in more than 35 states, kills microbes with physics, not chemistry. "It pulls electrons out of the cell wall, literally...