Phoenix Flow Systems

Description

Phoenix Flow Systems was started by C. Kevin Becker almost 21 years ago after he was laid off from Ortho Diagnostics Systems(when it was sold to Becton Dickinson) shortly after he broke his leg in a bicycle crash. Kevin had started his career in flow cytometry under the tutelage of Susan Wormsley approximately 7 years prior as a service man for the Ortho Cytofluorograf. It was through the relationships he built up with many early adopters of flow cytometry while fixing their flow cytometers that enabled PFS to be successful. Going back to his roots, Kevin first offered repairs and service contracts on Cytofluorografs and air cooled Argon laser upgrades to flow cytometers. Remember Omnicrhome lasers? The first software product PFS started selling was MultiCycle AV, DNA analysis software. (Which we still sell today) This product was made available to PFS by Dr. Peter Rabinovitch from the Univ. of Washington, Seattle. Kevin used to repair Dr. Rabinovitch's Cytofluorograf. Over the years, PFS distributed other fine DOS software products developed by Dr. Rabinovitch and Mike Shen. First there was Multi2D, then MultiPlus and MultiTime, kinetic data analysis software. Kevin also attempted selling Windows listmode analysis software (ListView) and PC data acquisition software but was not successful in these fields. PFS was also at one point the distributor of the Partec flow cytometers, but differences in basic mind sets between PFS and Partec destroyed this relationship. It was while Kevin was traveling the world, participating in many flow cytometry courses, teaching DNA analysis, that the next momentous event occurred in the PFS corporate time line (17 years ago). Kevin met his future wife, Margie. At the time, Margie was a Coulter flow cytometry sales rep on the East Coast of the USA and had recently won top salesperson award of the year. They met at the flow cytometry course at Boudin College, Maine. Margie and Kevin fell in love. Margie quit here job with Coulter and moved to California to work with Kevin at PFS. Margie and Kevin were married. Then other friends of Kevin's changed Margie's and his life. Dr. Darzynkiewicz () and Dr. Traganos from Brander Cancer Center called and said they had developed a new assay for measuring apoptosis and were tired of getting many technical questions about it. Dr. D&T thought PFS should develop a reagent kit for this assay, complete with control cells, so investigator would stop calling them with technical issues. . The assay they developed was the TUNEL assay for measuring apoptosis. Fortunately, Margie came from a lab background and so was able to create this product for PFS, because Kevin could fix flow cytometers and computers, but didn't know what end of a pipette to suck on. So was created the Apo-Direct & Apo-BrdU TUNEL assay kit by PFS. Then the Absolute-S cell proliferation kit using the patented SBIP technology from Dr. D&T. PFS was now going in another direction besides software. This was a good thing as well, because Kevin was also not a programmer, which is a necessary skill to be successful in the flow cytometry software market.

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