I immediately looked to find somebody that could be a chief operating officer caliber person who would manage, who could manage $150 to $200 million business in this arena. And he started here about December and we went on our road show I think it's like January 6th we started our road show in 1997.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) Since the IPO, new products have rolled out and hundreds of jobs have been created. At the time of this taping, annual revenues were nearing $250 million with 1200 on the payroll. The number one seller today is the Triage Meter and devices for detecting congestive heart failure. (Biosite says it this way: The number one seller today is the Triage BNP Test, an aid in the diagnosis of congestive heart failure.)

KEN: The production process is actually very, very complicated. We're dealing with chemicals, biological materials that can in effect die if you don't treat them properly. So there's really a lot of skill that's involved in actually making the product. Yes it is very overwhelming and it took us actually several years to develop the manufacturing procedures, to be good enough that would allow us to give very irreproducible results in the field. Many thousands of steps actually go into making the reagents, and then also many steps to go into actually building the device itself.

HATTIE: OK, now that we know there's a process, a thousand steps, why can't everybody knock this off?

KEN: Well, we have intellectual property for one that prevents other people from doing it. So that's a very large impediment. But we also believe that just the trade secrets that we have here that allow us to do that, the expertise that has taken us years to learn is also an impediment to others.