The April 15/May 15 issue of The BioTimes, a San Leandro (CA) biotechnology newspaper, includes a feature story (page 14) on Laboratory Equipment Company.  Written by BioTimes' Karl Schroff, the story focuses on two generations of customer service marked by LabEquipCo's 50th anniversary this year.

The following is reprinted by permission of The BioTimes.

A Second Generation Bio-Company: A Unique Achievement

In October 1956, when UC-Berkeley biochemist Heinz Frankel-Conrat was making biohistory by taking apart and then re-assembling the tobacco virus, a few miles south a small laboratory and instrument company was already celebrating their 8^th anniversary.

The phrase, second generation bio-company, sounds a bit odd. We’re more accustomed to hearing about a new gene-based discovery seeding a new bio-venture then a local San Francisco Bay Area company celebrating it’s golden anniversary. Ours is an industry that’s constantly asking, "What have you discovered lately?" There’s little time for reflection on past accomplishments. The future demands we focus on the discovery that’s waiting just around the next corner. This is an opportunity to put into perspective and focus, what the last fifty years have meant to our industry.

In 1948, J. Karl Kolhede and Albert Schlichtmann founded Laboratory Equipment Company (LEC) in the San Francisco Bay area to provide representation and product support for customers on the West Coast. Their choice of location, in the heart of Northern California’s biotech industry, couldn’t have been more logistically on the mark.

There was a laboratory and instrumentation market before Genentech.
Many in our industry identify the founding of Genentech in 1976 by venture capitalist Robert Swanson and UCSF biochemist Herbert Boyer as the most important date in the Biotech industry’s timeline. Few realize there was a vibrant and growing science market in the bay area long before 1976.

Two and a half decades before the founding of Genentech, LEC had already built a customer base composed primarily of industrial and university research laboratories. Whether it was Stanford, UC-Berkeley or UCSF announcing their latest discovery, it was a good bet that LEC supplied the equipment and instruments these universities were making history with.

Brent Kolhede, one of the founders namesake, summed up LEC’s marketing and new product sourcing policy in four simple words, "Scientists want the best." Back in 1948, it was casework or balances. Today, it may be the latest on-line continuous non-invasive cell viability assay system from Cellstat Technologies in Belmont, California, or CO2 incubators from Sanyo, in Osaka, Japan.

Laboratory equipment makers are critical to the biotech discovery process.
Bio-Rad founder and CEO David Schwartz put it succinctly when he said, " In the past, researchers spent 60 percent of their time just preparing for the experiment and 40 percent on the actual experiment. Today almost everything is pre-prepared."

The critical marriage of equipment hardware (or software) to process application should make this pre-preparation successful. Having joined LEC just as the biotech market began it’s dramatic growth in 1974, Brent Kolhede has seen the rapid speed with which new equipment has entered the market. This dramatic explosion in new products and computer-based systems has complicated the new equipment decision making process.

Bob Dubridge of Lynx Therapeutics in Hayward, CA., depends heavily on LEC to prescreen new equipment. Specifically Bob feels, "If LEC sells the instrument we are looking for, we buy it from them. Experience tells me their price will be good and service excellent."

Dramatic growth in foreign sources of biotech equipment and instruments
over last fifty years.
It’s impossible to leaf through any biotech publication without seeing a foreign address under an ad for a new piece of equipment. While cost is always a factor in the purchase decision, biotech companies are driven by the need to successfully produce a result, be it the next clinical trial phase or an FDA marketing approval. The fact that a critical piece of equipment is made in Germany or Japan is of little interest to the researchers on the verge of discovery.

Maneuvering foreign equipment through often murky international waters requires experience and finesse. LEC was a global company when there was such an entity as the USSR or Soviet Union. They have a unique perspective on the growth of international sourcing. Brent has identified a key obstacle LEC had to hurdle when foreign instrument and equipment makers began offering new and superior products, "Our customers readily accepted the performance of these new products, but overcoming the fear that parts and service were literally worlds away, was difficult."

Marlis Elliot of Cell Genesys in Foster City, has been dealing with LEC since May of 1985, and credits their success at overcoming this problem to, "Service, service and more service."

And now for an encore…

We asked many of LEC’s client’s to identify what’s needed over the next fifty years for a productive Biotech supplier to Biotech user relationship to grow and mature. Angelita de Leon of Biotechnology Purchasing Services in Burlingame, CA, answered with words seldom heard in this era of micro-management skepticism, " Service, trust, friendship and loyalty." It’s apparent from talking to many of LEC’s clients, that the seeds carefully planted fifty years ago by J. Karl and Albert have firmly taken root in the current generation at the helm. We wish them another successful fifty years.

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