Peter Galen (CIT ’76) is the CIO and co-founder of Hemex Health, an Oregon-based medical device company developing a more affordable and robust blood disease diagnostic platform. Their flagship product, Gazelle, is an affordable point-of-care diagnostic tool that uses electrophoresis to test for a variety of diseases including sickle cell and beta thalassemia.
What was the original inspiration for you to start Hemex?
There were two parts to this. First, my long time business partner Patti White called me up one day and said something along the lines of “Hey Peter, we’re getting old, and if we want to have a big impact on the world we have to do it now.” We especially wanted to make an impact on underserved populations, and believed the best way to do this was and still is by building a sustainable company.
The second part of this was going back to Case Western and talking to researchers and the tech transfer office. They had a few interesting technologies available for commercialization and suggested we put them together into one company. We liked their idea and put these technologies together into a device that could serve lower income countries very well.
If you had the opportunity to travel back in time to when you founded Hemex with the knowledge you have today, what are the 2 biggest things you would do differently?
First, I would have entered the U.S market much earlier. We’ve been very successful with our progress in lower and middle income countries, but we’ve found it’s been more difficult to attract investors with the majority of our revenue outside the U.S. We’ve still had an exceptional fundraising record, but it would have been much easier to raise if we entered the U.S earlier.
Second, I would have switched to having our own captive/internal engineering team much earlier. We started off using a contract engineering team and while our partnership with them was successful, we could’ve operated more efficiently if we switched to a captive team earlier. A captive model gives you a lot more stability with your team and better control over the engineering process. Contractors also tend to move engineers around quite a bit, which can inhibit the building of the core expertise necessary to efficiently and effectively invent and improve products.
What if you could travel back in time to freshman year of college? What are the 2 biggest things you would do differently from then until now?
For background, I carried a 2.0 GPA for my first 3 years of college. Basically, I only went to class for tests. I was unmotivated and had no idea what I wanted to do. I tried a few majors but none of them seemed to stick, so I dropped out of school and worked in a chemical factory for 2 years to force myself to mature.
I came back to school much more motivated and disciplined and carried a 4.0 GPA until graduation. I went from essentially academic probation to the dean’s high honors list and admission into many top graduate schools. My advice would be don’t go to college before you have motivation. If I could go back in time, I would have dropped out earlier and forced myself to mature earlier. You don’t necessarily have to know what you want to do, but you have to be motivated to succeed.
Number 2, always do things that on average you enjoy. Life is too hard to do things you don’t enjoy. You won’t do your best work and excel if you don’t enjoy what you’re doing. Excelling and being exceptional at your field is what builds you a great life, and enjoyment is the foundation for this.
What’s something you think that you do right, but a lot of people in your industry do wrong?
What I love doing is taking expensive, high-end things, and making them simple, high-quality, and easy to use. Most people focus on adding new features and capabilities, the flashy stuff. I focus on the core, most important capabilities, and making the things that people use every day really, really good.
Additionally, in the medical device industry most people want to use all medical grade components in their products. I’ve found that consumer grade components are actually much better. In addition to being much less expensive, consumer grade components tend to be better quality. If you make millions of something, you can afford to put much more engineering into its design and manufacturing process. You can’t afford to put as much thought into something you are only making a few thousand of, even if you try to be more careful and pay more attention to your finished products. Because of this, I’ve found that consumer grade parts tend to have much less unit variability, a key consideration for manufacturing high-quality devices.
You’ve had an exceptional career in medical devices and R&D without a PhD. What are your thoughts on the importance of graduate school and what is your advice for undergraduates or recent graduates who are thinking about pursuing a PhD?
It’s a bit different now versus when I was in college, there weren’t nearly as many PhDs back then. I think it still depends a lot on what you like to do though. When I was in college, I loved products and inventing things but didn’t really like the repetitiveness of research.
If your goal is to rise up through the ranks of R&D in a large organization, you probably need a PhD nowadays. This wasn’t the case for me, but it seems like it is today.
However, I still believe that you can do anything and go anywhere if you are exceptional enough, even if you are in a research environment without a PhD. Additionally, when it comes to smaller startup companies or entrepreneurship, a PhD doesn’t matter much—not many entrepreneurs care if you have a PhD.
On the development side of R&D, I think the focus of a PhD isn’t on productive ideation and invention. PhD training is very slow and thoughtful, which draws a contrast to the “think fast and take chances” approach often needed to launch products and features. PhD’s tend to go very deep into a narrow area and try to understand that niche all the way, but to launch a successful and functioning product, you don't necessarily have to understand it all the way. You can spend a year working on an incredible model of how something works or you can spend a year building something that actually works.
So it depends a lot on what type of work you want to do. If you love the pure research environment, you should probably get a PhD. For those who are worried about the 6 year commitment, look into pursuing one in Europe—PhDs typically take 3 years there. A PhD at a decent European university will be worth just as much if not more than one at an equivalent American school.
On the other hand, if you want to be more of a design engineer and create or work on devices and products, I think 6 years of work experience will pay off much more than a PhD. Especially with a masters and/or technical secondary major, I think you can have an incredibly successful career in development without a PhD.
Hemex Health is one of the CWRU-founded ventures in the CWRU Alumni Venture Fund portfolio.
This article was written by CWRU Alumni Venture Fund Fellow Amos Langsner, class of 2025.