By SHANNON HOLFOTH
Business First

The kind of great ideas that become patentable inventions often strike at unexpected moments.

Pamela Eigenbrod came home one day tired from spending hours curling women's hair during the wedding and prom season in 2005. Eigenbrod, a hairstylist and owner of Kutter's Kreations in Depew, came up with her invention that night while relaxing during an episode of the ABC show "Lost."

"We thought, ‘Why would we stand here with a curling iron for an hour and a half curling hair? What can we do to make it easier for ourselves?' "

So Eigenbrod, Laura Peters and Dorothy Tudor created Do-Faux Curls, individual attachable curls that can be pinned to the head with bobby pins. Finishing a complete updo with the curls, which are made from human hair, takes half an hour, Eigenbrod said.

Now on the market with two kits - one for French curls and one for spiral curls - Do-Faux Curls come in several shades. Eigenbrod said her salon began using the product in 2005 when they applied for the patent, but didn't start marketing the curls until late last year when the patent came through.

"The waiting process (for the patent) was horrible," Eigenbrod said. "We had to make revisions three times, and the wait and see was just brutal."

A private investor contributed $50,000 to the project, and Eigenbrod and her two fellow inventors funded the rest of the $75,000 total development cost, which included manufacturing, marketing and the patent costs. Eigenbrod declined to release the investor's name.

The patent process and getting the product to market absorbed most of their funds - leaving little money for advertising, said Eigenbrod. However, she remains optimistic about the response from consumers, and said Walt Disney World has expressed interest in using Do-Faux at its Bibbidy Bobbidy Boutique, a beauty salon where young girls are made up to look like princesses.

"It's just a matter of getting it out there and having people see it," she said. "Once they see it ... they're going to buy it."

A matter of materials

While the Do-Faux team came up with a product that helped them succeed in their field, other inventors find that an invention can lead them into a whole new career.

That's the case for Steve Rohring, owner of United Materials International, Ceramic Matrix, Composite Systems and Apex Technologies - all of which deal with composite and ceramic materials and high-pressure technology. Rohring, who formerly ran a metal manufacturing company, said he caught the invention bug five years ago while researching high-pressure nanotechnology at different universities.

After working with professors at Clarkson University, he started his own company in Potsdam. He invented a method of applying high pressure on nanometer-sized particles to produce ceramic materials that are of higher quality because they involve such a high level of detail.

Rohring has a few patents in that area, plus one pending, but said his most recent project involves using the technology to create a new breed of windmills.

The toughest challenge to inventing isn't creating the product, according to Rohring, it's funding, marketing and commercializing it - a process that he says takes about four years. He said 90 percent of inventions don't get commercialized because of lack of a good business model or funds, and less than 25 percent of the products his companies develop get commercialized.

Rohring said it takes strong will to keep inventing despite disappointments.

"You have to have an extremely optimistic personality or you'll never get anywhere," he said. "It takes the type of person that can't fail. It's stubbornness, really. I won't take no for an answer."

Plan B

When James Mayrose of Akron began work on his dissertation at the University of Buffalo in 1998, he wanted to create something helpful to the medical field. Along with two colleagues, he created a glove intended to detect tumors using force and position sensors.

Today, industrial businesses use the product to re-engineer parts. He says the glove can save product development time because designers can pull up an image of the object they're working on and alter it using computers.

Why the switch from medical to industrial applications? Mayrose said the process of getting a medical product to market is much tougher than with the industrial market.

In 2004, Mayrose and his partners, Thenkurussi Kesavadas and Kevin Chugh, won the Inventor of the Year Award from the Niagara Frontier Intellectual Property Law Association and the Technical Societies Council for the glove. The three started a company called Tactus Technologies in Getzville after completing their dissertations and focus now on developing software for the industrial and education sectors.

Mayrose said they are still working on bringing the glove to market in the medical field.

"Early on, it was just to make a difference," Mayrose said. "You want to do something that either improves the quality of life or changes the way people do things with something that makes life easier.... It's just exciting."

The desire to make a difference

The 2007 Inventor of the Year, David Hangauer, created a drug to prevent tumors from growing and metastasizing, or spreading to other parts of the body. The drug, KX2-391, blocks signals that stimulate tumors to grow and spread.

The drug is a culmination of 15 years of research with Kinex Pharaceuticals at the University at Buffalo. Hangauer said the drug is in phase two of three in clinical trials and, if those succeed, it will take five years to get it on the market.

Hangauer's advice for other researchers in the medical field?

"First find good partners. You can't do it by yourself. Two, do it because you have a passion for it. It's not a job, it's like a mission," he said. "For me, it was because of the huge medical need ... so many people dying of cancer every year and people close to me dying of cancer. That's the number-one motivation."

Another potential breakthrough in the medical field came from Harvey Arbesman, a dermatologist in Williamsville. Arbesman created a method to monitor the progression of Lou Gehrig's disease, or Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), by measuring the elasticity of patients' skin - elasticity decreses as the disease progresses - in a non-invasive way.

Because the progression of ALS cannot be detected by blood or urine tests, Arbesman's skin-elasticity test allows researchers to more accurately measure the effectiveness of different ALS medications.

Arbesman said the idea, which might potentially be used to detect ALS sooner, is patent-pending.

Like Mayrose and Hangauer, the inventor was motivated by both academic and practical possibilities.

"I think it's the intellectual challenge," Arbesman said, "and the knowledge that if it works, you'll have a great impact on lots of people's lives."