Dr. Andrew Lees

My name is Andrew Lees. I'm the founder and Scientific Director of Fina BioSolutions, a small research and development company located in Rockville, Maryland. I started Fina Bio in 2006, based on my expertise in the area of what is called conjugate vaccines or conjugation.

Fina BioSolutions has three main areas. One is based in my specialty area of conjugation chemistry, which is the linking of molecules in order to make them more biologically useful, specifically for vaccines. Another area is in molecular biology.

We've developed an E. coli strain that has an oxidative intercellular environment. The third area that our company works in are polymers that are used for various diagnostic reagents, based on, again, our expertise in conjugation chemistry and our ability to characterize polymer-based vaccines.

My goal in starting Fina bio was to help promote affordable conjugate vaccines. These are some of the most expensive and complex vaccines in the routine childhood immunization program. We're now nearly 15 years old.

We have licensed technology. We have royalty coming in from our agreements and we have developed a remarkable E. coli strain that not only produces the CRM197 conjugate vaccine protein, but also is able to produce a number of other valuable proteins.
We not only have the expertise in the area of conjugate vaccines, but we have a laboratory where we can work with companies to help them to develop protocols, transfer the method to the company, train their scientists and help them to implement the conjugation technology. We mainly buy used equipment.

The materials that we were keeping in our -80 freezers were becoming increasingly critical and increasingly valuable. Any shutdown time would be very costly to us. And the combination of the heat that was being put out, making the room essentially unusable, and the need for reliable -80 storage caused me to start looking around for new freezers.

I was aware of PHC for a number of years through our local rep. In the end, I did purchase from them. I had a good price and I was convinced about the energy efficiency and the reliability of the PHC freezers.

We are extremely happy with the PHC freezers. Once we bought the second freezer, the temperature in the room went from being baking to being comfortable.

We can see from the large screen on the front of the freezers that they're holding temperature very well. They have an alarm system that lets us know if we've accidentally left the door open too long. They have good power regulation. The PHC freezer has a built-in regulator that takes care of that.

We since started to worry about our -20 freezer. Again, this was a piece of used equipment. And while we could have certainly purchased another ordinary one or another used one, and it would have been adequate, even the -20s use a lot of electricity, and I'm really trying to make the lab more energy efficient.

The PHC -20 freezer that we bought, it is the only one of these that we could find that had an ENERGY STAR rating on it. Everybody in the lab loves the new freezer. It's cool.

But one of the things that made a difference to us as a research laboratory, we are constantly opening and closing the doors on our -80 freezers. Some freezers are better for long-term storage and some freezers recover more quickly if you're opening and closing the doors a lot.

And we decided that the PHC freezers were better for when you needed to use your freezer frequently. Fina Bio's grown from one person, me, to now more than half a dozen PhD scientists. We have great scientists.

They're just terrific workers and they're the ones that have allowed me to help further grow the company. And in turn, I view my job as helping them to grow. They've really contributed so much to making Fina BioSolutions what it is.