research-triangle-park
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The Duke Spinout Teaching Billion-Dollar Drugs to Fit Inside a Needle
Deborah Bitterfield raised about $8 million over seven years to prove that a protein could be dried into microbeads and shot through a needle. Then Novartis signed a deal worth up to nearly $1 billion.
BrightView Technologies
BrightView Technologies is a Durham, North Carolina optical-film company that designs and manufactures micro lens array (MLA) films using a discipline it calls computational optics. By engineering microscopic structures into rolls of film, BrightView gives engineers precise control over how light spreads, hides, brightens, and bends - powering automotive displays, consumer electronics, AR/VR headsets, LiDAR sensors, and LED lighting. The company pairs in-house optical design software with high-volume roll-to-roll production, supplying global manufacturers from a single Research Triangle Park facility.
Cutting Edge Information
Cutting Edge Information (CEI) is a Research Triangle Park-based market research and data analytics firm that builds the world's largest specialty-specific database of Fair Market Value (FMV) rates for engaging healthcare professionals. Pharmaceutical, biotech, and medical device companies use CEI's FMV data, HCP Fee Calculator, and Compliance Insights to set rates that are both competitive enough to attract top clinical talent and defensible enough to satisfy regulators. With 230,000+ rate observations across 126 countries and 280+ specialties, CEI serves more than 300 clients, including over 70% of the top 25 pharmaceutical companies and 8 of the top 10.
Eric Bolesh
Eric Bolesh is the Chief Executive Officer of Cutting Edge Information, a Research Triangle Park firm that has become the de facto industry standard for fair market value (FMV) data in life sciences. One of the company's first employees back in 2002, he spent two decades turning the murky question of what a cardiologist in Bulgaria or a pharmacist in the UK should be paid into a defensible, data-driven discipline. A Harvard graduate and frequent speaker at compliance conferences, he is widely regarded as a thought leader on healthcare-provider engagement and the economics of compliant compensation across more than 130 global markets.
Michael Milburn
Michael V. Milburn is the CEO and President of GeneCentric Therapeutics, a Durham, North Carolina biotech building RNA-based liquid biopsy tools that read a tumor's behavior from a single tube of blood. A structural biologist by training, he helped solve the first crystal structures of the Ras cancer protein at Berkeley in the late 1980s, then spent decades building research engines at Sirtris, Plexxikon, and Metabolon before taking the top job at GeneCentric in 2019. His current bet: that the fragments of DNA shed by tumors carry enough information to infer gene expression, not just mutations, turning a blood draw into a near-complete molecular portrait of cancer.
Robert Mallernee
Robert Mallernee is the founder and CEO of Eton Solutions, the Research Triangle Park company behind AtlasFive, an integrated, cloud-native, AI-driven platform that runs the back office for more than 1,000 of the world's wealthiest families. A CFA with three-plus decades in ultra-high-net-worth wealth management, he built the software inside a real multi-family office (Eton Advisors) before spinning it out to sell to the rest of the industry. His pitch is blunt: spreadsheets are 'separate-sheets,' and the modern family office needs one system, not a hundred. In 2025 Eton closed a $58M Series C to push AtlasFive and EtonAI deeper into private equity, funds and global private banks.