29 Jun Fred Lee, The UW Radiologist With Startup Vision
Fred Lee is not afraid to put himself out there.
Lee is a radiologist at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics, where his primary area of interest is the ablation, or elimination, of cancerous tumors. He says that around the year 2000, he decided that the radio frequency ablation devices he and his colleagues were using “were just not good enough.” But since Lee’s background wasn’t in engineering, he had to reach out for help.
“I knew exactly what I wanted to do to improve the devices, but I wasn’t equipped to make my ideas a reality,” Lee says. “So I walked over to the [UW-Madison] engineering school and I started knocking on doors.”
After a few unsuccessful pitches to researchers, Lee got a bite from John Webster, a professor emeritus of biomedical engineering at the school. Webster found a graduate student named Dieter Haemmerich who was willing to assist Lee, and together the two built the device Lee envisioned. They later licensed the technology to Valleylab, now a brand of Medtronic (NYSE: MDT), the Ireland-based medtech giant whose products include radio frequency ablation systems.
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