The Aubrey Group develops complex medical therapeutic and monitoring equipment for start-up companies.

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Charting the success of Aubrey Group is as simple as looking at the company’s various facilities through the years. Founder and CEO Vytas Pazemenas says he started the company in his bedroom and garage in 1994, and since then has moved it in and out of three different facilities before settling into its current 43,000-square-foot location in Irvine, Calif.

The firm develops complex medical therapeutic and monitoring equipment for start-up companies. Among the devices the firm has developed are blood pumps for patients awaiting heart transplants, monitors that measure heart rate and respiration rate without direct contact with the patient, and heart muscle treatment devices that eliminate heart flutter. Aubrey Group specializes in devices for cardiovascular applications, Pazemenas says, but the firm has also developed many other types of devices, such as a portable artificial kidney, a mutant gene detection system, and a device for destroying precancerous cells in the esophagus.   

Not only does Aubrey Group tackle engineering and manufacturing of such complex and challenging devices, but it also does this primarily for companies that are just getting started in the medical industry. “Our customers are mainly start-up companies, medical device start-up companies,” Pazemenas says.   

This means that Aubrey Group must not only be highly skilled at the nuts and bolts of its work, but also in the intangibles of working closely with fast-paced, cash-conserving start-up companies. Pazemenas believes that close working relationships with its start-up clients are critical to success.

Broad Expertise
The technical prowess of Aubrey Group, however, is what makes everything it does possible. Pazemenas says the firm has some of the most diverse capabilities in the industry. “We are competent in a number of technologies, so we can handle a broad set of design challenges,” he says. “We have physicists, we have biomedical engineers, we have systems engineers and they’re used to dealing with complex systems.”   

The firm’s engineering expertise runs a gamut of disciplines, from software to fluidics. Pazemenas says the company’s mechanical engineers are capable of handling sophisticated analyses of fluid flow, thermal effects, material stresses, and other analytical and simulation tasks – skills that are often needed at the Aubrey Group.    

“These are complex devices, and their design requires a whole set of engineering disciplines,” he says.
    
Napkin Inspiration
The cocktail napkin is the mythical starting point for many brilliant business ideas, and Pazemenas says Aubrey Group helps start-ups take their ideas from napkin to the production floor. The firm has been contacted by start-ups while their ideas were still in the napkin stage.   

“A start-up company calls us and asks us if we would be willing to develop this device for them, so we talk to them, they usually visit us and take a look at the facility, and talk to staff,” Pazemenas says. From there, Aubrey Group develops a formal proposal and a rough estimate of the cost of the project. If both sides agree to the terms, the firm begins work.  
        
Case Study
One example of how Aubrey Group’s process works is the cardiac ablation system it developed for start-up Epicor Medical, which was later acquired by St. Jude Medical Inc. Epicor delivered the original requirements to Aubrey Group in 2000, and the firm spent two years developing the clinical test units.   

The product was developed to block the currents that create heart flutter, or atrial fibrillation. These are dangerous because they may cause blood clots to form. A ring of ultrasound transducers is wrapped around a patient’s heart. These emit high-intensity sound that treats the heart muscle so that it does not conduct these currents. Before, the most effective cure for atrial fibrillation was the Cox-Maze procedure, which involved incisions into the heart muscle and required a very high level of skill from the surgeon.    

A major problem encountered by Aubrey Group’s 13-member team, which included Pazemenas, was that under some conditions power could be reflected back from the transducers to the amplifiers and damage them. Since it was not possible to adjust power fast enough to avoid damage, extensive testing and some changes to the design were necessary to solve the problem.    

The production systems were completed in 2004, and, today, the system is in use in hospitals in Boston, Chicago, Houston, Kentucky and North Carolina. Aubrey Group continues to provide support for St. Jude as it refines the product.   

Start-ups will continue to turn to Aubrey Group for help, which gives him reason to be optimistic about the company’s future. “There’s a general, overall trend to outsource product development,” he says.