The low hum of fluorescent lights mixed with electric whirs from walls of scientific equipment form a peaceful soundtrack inside Aleo BME, Inc.’s Innovation Park laboratory. But it’s broken with metallic screeches as the company’s chief scientist Jian Yang forces a large desk onto a loading cart and out the lab’s doorway.

Sounds of Yang’s labored breaths as he puts all his weight behind the cart are evident of the bio¬technology research and development company’s ongoing expansion. Yang’s wife, fellow scientist and the company’s CEO, used to sit there and field calls in the lab. 

“He’s just moving it down the hall,” Chao Liu says. “We need a quiet place to answer the phone!”

Further evidence of Aleo BME’s growth since the three-person company moved into Innovation Park’s technology center this past summer can be found in its progress in multiple fields of study — chief among them, a dye that can help make critical early diagnoses of cystic fibrosis and of a nerve regeneration device Yang says will be a “game-changer.”

Further evidence of Aleo BME’s growth since the three-person company moved into Innovation Park’s technology center this past summer can be found in its progress in multiple fields of study — chief among them, a dye that can help make critical early diagnoses of cystic fibrosis and of a nerve regeneration device Yang says will be a “game-changer.”

A faculty member in Penn State’s bio engineering department, Yang was looking for a way to further develop and test the fluorescent dye technology he helped work on and licensed from Penn State. 

To do so, he’d need a lab and funds to continue his work on the groundbreaking substance that can easily detect chloride concentration in sweat without interference from bromide and iodine as current cystic fibrosis tests do. As a result, those existing tests are less reliable and make early detection — critical for successful early treatment of the disease — tough.

Innovation Park has given Yang and his team a great staging ground in their second-floor labora¬tory, and its investment programs for start-up companies have helped Yang and Liu advance their work with $500,000 in funding. 

Settling on lab space was the first step. That was easily done when Liu said she simply walked up to the tech center’s second floor on a single recommendation and laid eyes on a pristine spot. It would soon be filled by the machines the company uses today.

“You couldn’t find any labs as good as this,” Liu says. “This is fantastic. All these things, we bought. We got going quick. It took us like two or three months to build this up.”

“We are scientists. We don’t know how to run businesses,” Yang adds with a chuckle. “But in this kind of environment, we feel very comfortable. We can get a lot of help from a lot of the programs. They’re all very helpful. This is why we feel like being here. We can be more successful and save some time.”

They’ve done both.

Yang has been testing the dye — AleoFluoS — with positive results and expects to move out of the Institutional Review Board stage “very soon.”

Yang and his team have also used Innovation Park to develop what he describes as a major breakthrough in the field of nerve repair and regen¬eration. His interest in the area of nerve therapy came as he watched a handful of his favorite athletes — primarily NBA stars Kobe Bryant and Steve Nash — struggle with nerve-related injuries. 

As Yang watched Bryant struggle to shoot the ball due to an ulnar nerve issue in his shooting elbow, he got the idea to look into developing a cast of sorts for nerves.

His eyes light up as he reaches into his shirt pocket and pulls out a small plastic bag containing a tiny, white tubular shaped object.

“With a small-gap nerve injury, doctors would have to suture the nerve,” Yang says. “With that, the nerve doesn’t grow very well, especially when the gap is bigger. What we’re trying to do is develop some magical poly¬mer, like an elastic material that can simulate the soft, elastic property of the nerve. We’re making this tubular structure to bridge the gap to help the nerve to grow together.”

Yang says they have tested the device — officially dubbed the Peripheral Nerve Conduit — on rats and have successfully repaired nerve gaps of up to 1.3 centimeters. He and Liu are looking forward to trying larger gaps with the biodegradable tube, up to two centimeters. For injuries that result in those sizable gaps, there is no existing product that can help nerves grow over those distance, he says.

“If that proves to be successful, this is a game-changing technology.”

Aleo BME will continue to use its lab space — and new office down the hall — to develop these technologies.

“It’s Innovation Park,” Yang says. “It’s very nice, a very entrepreneurship atmosphere.”

Even for those like Aleo BME’s employees whose admitted business abil¬ities are dwarfed by their urges to innovate scientifically. They’ve found a place they can do both effectively.