The Suit Magazine

Look up above the ocean on a dark night in the Pacific Northwest, and you might be lucky to spot a few strains of the Aurora Borealis drifting across the sky. Look down, and you could see a very different pattern of lights: a phosphorescent species of jellyfish known as the Aequorea Victoria. They glow because of a green-fluorescent protein, or GFP, which is also found in several other marine animals.

GFP is more than just a pretty sight; it's immensely valuable to medical and biological research because it is the only non-toxic way to color-code living cells so that scientists can study the results of various experiments in real-time.

Dr. William Ward has been working with GFP since his post-doctoral studies in 1973. “My professional work is all about GFP,” he said. “Ours is the longest lived GFP lab in the world, having a track record of basic research dating back to the early ‘70s.”

Ward founded his company, Brighter Ideas Incorporated, to help move some of the discoveries he'd studied for years into the commercial arena. “Brighter Ideas CSO Dr. Michael Tota and I spend most of our creative energies inventing and discovering while trying to infuse the excitement of scientific discovery into the others in the company—mostly part-time student employees. As the first person in the world to exploit GFP as an educational tool, I never stop being a teacher,” he said. “GFP is now one of the most important research and diagnostics tools in the entire field of life sciences. In just the past 18 years, more than 20,000 research papers have been published on GFP applications in cell biology, cancer metastasis, stem cell research, developmental biology, and a host of other related fields.”

Ward's chief goal for Brighter Ideas is to have his company noticed for its landmark work. “I want my personal creation to be accepted, recognized, and appreciated,” he said. “What success we have had comes from the drive to succeed. Everyone associated with the company seems to share the vision, ambition, and drive that I feel every day.” He also intends to expand his efforts to bring GFP into educational use and will begin offering a college-level course for gifted teens this summer.

As a scientific entrepreneur, Ward believes that what he and his fellow innovators need most is a system to move new discoveries into the marketplace so that they can become a part of consumers' lives. “We need critical evaluation of the scientific merit and commercial potential of our inventions, technologies, and methodologies,” Ward explained. “It makes absolutely no sense to me for universities and government agencies to take the attitude that cream will always rise to the top, even if we pay it no attention.”

In addition to its work with GFP, Brighter Ideas is studying the use of soybean peroxidase (SBP) as an industrial replacement for formaldehyde. “We have developed a unique method for purifying the protein—patent pending—and we have found two other applications for SBP that are also patentable but not ready to be disclosed to the public at this point,” Ward said. He enjoys working with both GFP and SBP for aesthetic reasons over and above their scientific usefulness, explaining, “Most proteins are colorless, but GFP is brilliantly green and SBP is brilliantly red. Every day is Christmas in our lab.”

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