Midwest Moxie: Fueled by nuclear

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Kathleen Gallagher hosts Midwest Moxie, a show about “visionary entrepreneurs” in the Midwest. 

In this episode, she welcomes guest Mike Fern of Eichrom Technologies. Fern began his career at Baxter Healthcare as a chemist, later earned an MBA, and then - seeing no clear path to the roles he wanted - answered a newspaper ad in 1990 that led him to become the first employee at a company which commercialized discoveries from Argonne National Lab in an Evanston, Illinois. That company was Eichrom and 15 years later, Fern was named president.

Today, Eichrom has a more than 90% share of the global purified isotope chemistry market, serving customers in nuclear medicine, environmental cleanup, and other industries, and employs about 40 people. The company’s initial funding came from noted Chicago investment firm Arch Venture Partners, and in 1998 it was acquired for an undisclosed price by GCI, the family office of Land’s End founder Gary Comer.

Fern says his initial goal as President wasn’t growth for growth’s sake. Instead, he focused on establishing a “good foundation,” describing efforts to consolidate around the part of the business that was consistently profitable, spinning off and eliminating other pieces, and building company culture.

On nuclear power, Fern describes the operational risk during refueling and maintenance shutdowns, when many short-term workers enter areas with residual radioactivity and need temporary shielding made from lead and other dense metals. 

Fern says Eichrom knew as early as the year 2000 that the field of nuclear medicine was coming. He describes helping a Norwegian startup in the early 2000s developing a drug later marketed by Bayer called Zofigo, calling it the first drug that uses radiation to cure cancer, and noting it took 10–15 years to become commercially significant. 

He adds that even 3M tried to develop competing products decades ago but failed, in his view, because the market wasn’t large enough to meet the expectations of a big company. He also argues that many breakthroughs are customer-driven, describing a nuclear-medicine customer that needed shielded shipping containers for rapidly decaying materials; after a customer “champion” pushed it, Eichrom spent about two years iterating prototypes and designing around the customer’s needs, and it is now a major growth area.