Dr. Charles Scarantino, co-founder of Sicel Technologies has accepted businessempiremag.com’s request to interview him, but he has also made a request of his own. He wants his son to be interviewed as well for another venture he help co-found since it was originally his son’s idea.
I accept his counter offer and find that Chas is an interesting individual himself. Without knowing I meet Chas in the parking lot of his father’s office building in Research Triangle Park. We exchange greetings and soon find his father walking to the front of the building to meet us. “Great you are both here early,” he says as he leads us into a large conference room. Chas is interviewed first as Dr. Scarantino looks from the other side of the table. Wise with wisdom he listens with the slight smirk of a proud father, occasionally making a comment. He admits letting his son go through some hardships just so he could learn from his mistakes which will make him better in business. “It is his ability to adapt and change that makes him a good businessman” he says about Chas just before the focus of the conversation shifts towards him.

His PDA phone still sits on the polished wood table. He has remained reclined in his chair with his legs crossed. He doesn’t want to steal the spotlight from his son so he only does a quick overview of his company hitting all the main points. As a radiation oncologist he realized that you can cure anyone on paper but not all tumor cells are the same. He recently developed the DVS®, a small implantable radiation dosimeter that is smaller than a quarter in length. His main goal in development was to have something that could be put inside the patient and tell him more about what was going on during treatment. The versatile product can provide data for the actual radiation dose hitting the tumor and the temperature during hyperthermia treatment among other things. At this point the DVS® is mainly for breast and prostate cancer patients but his company is working to expand to other types of cancer. The product has been FDA approved and its recent success has allowed them to implement a reimbursement code and hire a sales team. Since 2006 the company has grown to have forty five employees which include a sales team, engineers, and other regulatory staff members.

Being an entrepreneur in the medical field isn’t exactly a common practice but he remembers early on having the help of Dr. Troy Neagle. Dr. Neagle has his M.D. but has decided to stay with the engineering aspect pertaining to the medical field. Sicel started by hiring graduate students the first few years before getting to the point were they either had to stop or start investing their personal money. It was not long after they decided to use their own money that additional funding from outside sources began to become available. He says that, “Now the new technology is helpful, it has allowed us to produce a very small device and we could not have done that without the development in technology. I must give that credit to the engineers not myself.”

“My cancer patients require radiation so convincing the patient to use the DVS® which is the first device of its kind is actually not that hard of a sale,” states Dr. Scarantino.

Even with all the bumps and bruises that he has experienced along the way he says that the hardest part has not been development of the product but dealing with federal agencies. “If your going to sell anything in the medical field you must get approval from the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) and even though the process is not hard it is slow. Dealing with medi-care and reimbursement can also be slow,” Dr. Scarantino mentions. Even after hiring a patent attorney to help patent his product it still took four years for all the paperwork to go through.

Growth within the company has already stemmed from the number of patients choosing to use the DVS® while at the same time leaving great potential for growth to continue. Within such a short time frame the growth thus far has already forced the company to expand twice to accommodate. The fact that the company does not have any real competitors at this point does not hurt either. At this point the company is setup well enough to deal with research and manufacturing but having to deal with the problem of expanding is a problem that Dr. Scarantino says he would love to have.