Duke cardiologist will try to pump profits from ideas.

• Position: Includes multiple records

Duke University cardiologist Richard Stack, 51, wants to become a sprinter in an industry of sack-racers -- getting medical devices such as improved stents, small tubes used to open clogged blood vessels, to market in months instead of years. Lives are at stake, but so are profits. He's managing partner of newly created SyneCor LLP in the Research Triangle Park.

SyneCor is backed by $10.5 million from some of the country's top researchers, manufacturers and bankrollers of medical equipment. It's part of a larger movement called technology transfer -- systematic efforts to get ideas out of ivory towers and into the real world.

Stack should have a leg up on both technology and academia. He has a passion for devices and techniques that keep hearts pumping, and his bookshelves are lined with 300 manuscripts, books and articles he's written on medical equipment and technology.

Some of his inventions, such as a patented balloon device used to oxygenate blood during angioplasty, have been widely used, and in the 1980s, he became known as an early expert on stents, including one used in the neck to prevent strokes. He also teaches medicine at Duke, where he completed cardiology training in 1982.

Stack envisions SyneCor as both an incubator where scientists can hatch their own companies and as a base for high-powered networking to help them along.

Stack and several other Duke cardiologists invested $1.5 million, which they expect to recoup in a hurry. "We hope to have our first spinoff within a year, adding up to four a year thereafter," he says.

SyneCor has a second office in Menlo Park, Calif., headed by William Starling, founder and chairman of Cardiac Pathways Inc., which makes heart-rhythm devices. He's SyneCor's other managing partner.

Starling is the businessman. "I'm the scientist," says Stack, a Detroit native on leave from Duke, where he was also director of interventional cardiology. SyneCor will employ up to 12 staff members, becoming the kind of operation that not only Duke but most research universities increasingly need to bring about technology transfer. The rewards can be huge.

For example, Digital Optics Corp., a new company that uses techniques licensed from UNC Charlotte for making micro-optical lenses for bar-code readers, employs more than 100 and was named one of the country's fastest-growing young companies by Inc. magazine. Similarly, says Stack, some SyneCor technology is licensed from Duke, which holds an undisclosed...