Low pain, high gain: Suros Surgical Systems builds a better biopsy system, and is a model for building life sciences.

• Author: Kaelble, Steve

IT'S A CASE STUDY FOR building life-sciences businesses in Indiana.

Suros Surgical Systems, the fledgling Indianapolis-based medical-device company, has followed a script that life-sciences advocates might have written--building upon local knowledge and expertise, employing homegrown talent, gathering local capital and spending it cautiously, creating a market for itself. By doing so Suros has enjoyed impressive growth and caught competitors off-guard.

"We take tissue out of the body in the most compassionate way possible," says Jim Pearson, the company's president and CEO. The products that Suros designs, makes and markets remove tissue and biopsy samples in a way that's efficient, effective and--compared to alternatives--less painful or uncomfortable. The initial focus has been on breast biopsies, but the technology has further applications that may unfold in the not-too-distance future, including brain surgery.

The Suros script begins in Franklin, where entrepreneurs Joe Mark and Mike Miller started a medical-equipment company called Promex Technologies in 1990. The company's focus is biopsies--examining breast lesions, prostate tumors, bone marrow and other soft tissues and cancers--and through its US Biopsy division it makes the needles and devices used in the procedures. Mark, a Butler University graduate, entered the business from a career selling and then developing ophthalmic equipment. Miller, a Purdue engineering grad, spent nearly three decades as an engineer for RCA, now Thomson Consumer Electronics.

From almost the start of the Franklin company that makes traditional, manual biopsy equipment, Mark and Miller were investigating a different paradigm. What if they could take the painful and sometimes laborious breast-biopsy process and make it quick and automated? As they developed a product to address this new concept, they decided to spin it off into its own company, a move that began in late 1999 and early 2000.

The founders decided that their efforts were best spent developing the product rather than launching and running the new company. Thus, Suros began searching for a CEO.

Pearson had been involved in the sale and distribution of medical equipment, and his name surfaced as a possible chief. "I had sold Dr. Goedde, our medical director, an ultrasound years ago," says Pearson, an Ohio native who earned a psychology degree at Indiana University, competed for the IU wrestling team, was a Big Ten champ and tried for a spot on...