By YVETTE SAARINEN
Of the News-Register
The folks at Bioanalytical Systems, known as BASi, recently threw a barbecue to celebrate the 10th anniversary of their facility off Rivergate Drive in the McMinnville Industrial Park.
The company, 19 years old all together, is heavily secured and driven by protocol because of the exacting, sensitive work it does for the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device industries.
BASi is a drug development company providing contract research services and monitoring instruments to the world's leading drug development companies. Among its many tasks is to find the effective concentration of a drug when it enters the human body, according to Lori Payne, Ph.D., general manager of BASi's Northwest Laboratory in McMinnville.
The company offers detection, identification and quantification of drug compounds in biological matrices such as blood, plasma, urine, dialysate and tissues. In laymen's language, Payne said, that's like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Payne oversees the daily laboratory operations and directs the biotechnology services. Because many of the pharmaceutical clients are seeking U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval, following protocol and adhering to regulations are imperative. "The FDA is very into control," she said.
The work involves 24-hour monitoring and lots of documentation, she said.
All of BASi's 22 employees - from Ph.D.s to high school students - have had lots of training in not only FDA regulations but OSHA standards, as well.
The company's flagship drug is Taxol, Payne said. Taxol is the trade name for the generic drug Paclitaxel, a chemotherapy agent. Taxol is used in the treatment of breast, ovarian, lung, bladder, prostate, melanoma and other types of solid tumor cancers.
When they're not working for other clients, BASi employees are working on in-house development projects such as new methods of analysis, Payne said.
The company was founded in McMinnville as LC Resources, the brainchild of John Dolan, then with Linfield College. It was purchased by Bioanalytical Systems Inc., based in West Lafayette, Ind., in 2002.
Dolan, who lives in Amity, continues to do consulting work for the company.
Bioanalytical Systems is a public company traded on Nasdaq exchange under the symbol BASI. Revenue for the third quarter of this year was reported at $12.6 million, an increase of 26 percent from last year's comparable quarter.
BASi is ranked 13th among comparable companies and Payne feels that is just the right size.
It has adopted the whimsical logo of three bears, as in "Goldilocks and the Three Bears," to attest to that statement.
