Department of Biomedical Engineering

Tom Gaborski takes lab-to-market as VP of Life Sciences at SiMPore Inc.

Recent Ph.D. graduate Tom Gaborski is realizing his dream of entrepreneurship as VP of Life Sciences at UR spinoff, SiMPore, Inc. Tom helped found SiMPore Inc. in 2007 while he was a graduate student in the Ph.D. program. The company actually grew out of a chance experiment conducted by Tom and Chris Striemer, who was then a Ph.D. candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Chris had inadvertently made the world's thinnest nanoporous membrane while developing new materials for silicon-based lasers. Tom and Chris designed and conducted experiments to test if the nanoscale pores could be used to separate proteins of different sizes and charges and discovered that they did so very efficiently. The commercial potential of this discovery was immediately obvious to Tom.

Along with their advisors, Chris and Tom founded SiMPore to commercialize the discovery. The company now employs 9 people and started selling membranes in January of 2009. Sales have been steadily increasing as advertising efforts payoff and global interest in the material grows. Tom wears many hats in the small start-up but his primary job is to lead the company in its development of products for the biological sciences. Under Tom's leadership, devices for protein and DNA purification are already in the SiMPore product pipeline.