Doc knows success comes in small doses.

• Author: Richter, Chris
• Position: A brief skecth of physician Tom Young's career - Biography

Raleigh-based NeoFax LLC is a product of Tom Young's frustration. Early in his medical career, he found there were no guides for prescribing medicine to infants.

Drug doses for babies must take into account such factors as age and weight. He had to piece together information from book appendices, journals and other medical publications. "Decimal-point errors become very crucial," says Young, a neonatologist at WakeMed in Raleigh and professor of pediatrics at UNC Chapel Hill. "It's very easy to make a 10-fold dosing error."

When he came to WakeMed in the mid-1980s, he met Barry Man-gum, a pediatrician who is now professor of pharmacology and pediatrics at Duke University Medical Center. They own equal shares of NeoFax. In 1987, they published the first edition of NeoFax: A Manual of Drugs Used in Neonatal Care. It has become the authoritative source. The company, launched in 2001, sells about 30,000 copies of the book a year at $34.95 and produces editions for personal digital assistants. It introduced a Web version, NeoFax WebApp, in 2005.

Young, who is CEO, grew up in Pittsburgh and Cleveland. He studied engineering at the University of Cincinnati but didn't like it. Interested in medicine, he took time off to work in a hospital. He re-enrolled in college and earned his bachelor's in mathematics in 1976. He got his medical degree three years later from...