Taking a Bite Out of Pain

Even Wall Street types don’t hold back when Colette Cozean asks her stock question: “What is the first thing you think of when you think of dentists?”

“Pain!” they cry in unison.

The universality of the one-word response helps explain the explosion of attention that has come to Cozean in the weeks since the Food and Drug Administration approved her Irvine company’s innovation: a dental laser designed to treat tooth decay painlessly. Talk about hitting people where it hurts.

“I think that’s one of the things that has made this such big news for people because they can identify,” says Cozean, 39.

The mission of her company--Premier Laser Systems Inc.--is no less than the overthrow of the traditional high-speed dental drill. Not only does the laser make a soft, barely perceptible sound--not unlike popcorn popping, Cozean says--but it virtually eliminates the need for an anesthetic.

As chief executive officer of Premier, Cozean is one of the few women in America to head a technology company. And she’s one of the few CEOs who knows her way around a research laboratory as well as a boardroom.

Within days of the FDA’s May 7 announcement, the company’s stock price more than doubled, and, for the first time since going public in 1995, Premier hit the top 10 in trading volume on Nasdaq, far surpassing even Microsoft five days in a row.

Cozean was in New York meeting with a Wall Street analyst when the FDA issued its approval--a top agency official in Washington proclaiming the “use of lasers in dentistry is medicine for the 21st century.”

Over the next 10 hours, Cozean did nearly 20 back-to-back interviews with TV, radio and print reporters. In Irvine, all 20 of Premier’s phone lines were backed up throughout the day as dentists around the country called to ask about or place an order for the $39,000 laser system.

Premier has begun shipping lasers, and the first round of training sessions for dentists were completed two weeks ago at five clinical investigation sites around the country. It may be some time before the dental laser for removing tooth decay is as commonplace as the traditional drill among the nation’s 120,000 dentists, but Cozean is confident that day will come. Her company is at least a year and a half ahead of any competing lasers winning FDA approval, and until then, analysts say, Premier has the potential $4-billion-plus market to itself.

Cozean has gotten used to being at the forefront of the laser industry; being in the limelight is another matter. “I’m a person who seeks neither the Wall Street nor the media attention. That’s probably been one of the hardest things in the last couple of weeks, dealing with that,” she says.

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Securities analyst Scott Baily says Cozean’s experience in the technical and medical areas, combined with her “impressive business acumen,” make her unlike any CEO he’s ever come across. As he said the day of the FDA announcement: “The reason the company is at the forefront today is because of that woman.”

Cozean holds a doctorate degree in biomedical engineering and a master’s in electrical engineering--degrees she earned while also attending medical school. Her colleagues praise her outstanding intellect and indefatigable energy. Although her job requires her attention seven days a week--she routinely works 80 hours a week--family life is also a part of each day. She and her husband, Kim--they were high school sweethearts--make their home in Lake Forest with children Jesse, 10, and Chelsea, 8. Cozean manages to make it to most of her daughter’s school concerts and plays and her son’s sporting events and to teach his weekly Bible-study class.

“It becomes a juggling act,” she says. “You just have to continually look at where’s your priority. One thing I don’t spend a lot of time on is guilt in one area or another.”

She and her husband trade off cooking dinner. “We really think having family time over meals is important,” she says, “so we have breakfast together; we have dinner, almost always, together.”

After dinner she spends her time with her children, gets them to bed, then reads before retiring about 10. “But I’m oftentimes up between 2 and 4 a.m. That’s my quiet, creative time. That’s when I write, when most of our inventions have come from--all the stuff that I’ve patented. All those are 2-to-4 a.m.-ers.”

Cozean, who grew up in Glendale and Pasadena, knows what it’s like to be involved in a parent’s work world. She says she learned a lot from her parents, Patrick and Geraldine Day, both of whom were certified public accountants. “I learned that I didn’t really want to be an accountant,” she says with a laugh.

Cozean helped around her father’s office, as her own children help around hers. From running the copying machine and stapling tax returns at 6, she moved up to doing simple accounting at 11 and began accompanying her father on audits when she was 13.

“I didn’t like it a whole lot, but it sure helped in terms of reading financial statements and how to control cash flow and how to deal with the difficult times we’ve been through,” she says. “So I’ve been very thankful for the background, and I think some of the entrepreneurial spirit comes from there too.”

She says her parents never pushed her while she was growing up. “I think I pushed enough on my own,” she says. “What my parents did was make me know from the beginning that I was very special--at least to somebody, which was them--and that I could do what I set out to do.”

In high school and in college, she took math and science courses because they were her most difficult subjects. “I like things to challenge me, so I went for the hardest things. They keep me interested.”

When she wasn’t helping her father at work, Cozean helped her aunt, a UCLA cancer researcher. Cozean’s interest in the then-new field of biomedical engineering was aroused while she was in high school and met a research colleague of her aunt’s who was involved in neurophysiology.

After studying at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, Cozean transferred to USC, where she earned her bachelor’s in biomedical engineering. While earning her master’s in electrical engineering and a doctorate in biomedical engineering from Ohio State University, she was the only woman in the engineering school. (The engineering building didn’t even have a women’s restroom until her last year.)

Why biomedical engineering?

“I think it was a chance to apply science and math, which were challenging to me, to helping others,” she says. “And it also was one of the few engineering disciplines with a lot of people interaction.”

Although she attended medical school while working on her master’s and doctorate, Cozean dropped out of medical school short of graduation. She says she never intended to practice medicine.

Staying involved with research and development remains important to Cozean, and is what she most enjoys doing. “I negotiate every year with my board how much time I’m going to get to spend on [research and development] and clinical trials. It’s probably gone down to about 30% to 40%, but it’s still there.”

Board members prefer that she spend the majority of her time determining where Premier Laser Systems is going strategically and representing the company with Wall Street and the medical community.

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The FDA’s May 7 announcement culminated 10 years of development of the hard tissue dental laser, which began at the Irvine-based medical laser division of the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. Cozean, then Pfizer Laser Systems’ director of research and development, regulatory affairs and clinical programs, originally turned down the job when it was offered to her in 1986, saying that laser companies had generally never been profitable.

But she accepted the job a year later after realizing the possibilities--and potential profits--for using lasers for specific medical applications. When Pfizer’s new management decided to sell its then-money-losing laser division in 1991, Cozean led a management buyout of the fledgling company.

Confident that the company had the technology to develop--and ultimately manufacture and distribute--small, portable laser systems, Cozean helped raise $10 million needed for the buyout from family, friends, fellow employees and physicians familiar with the company.

Since then, the 49-employee Premier Laser Systems has experienced both highs and lows. The highs include manufacturing its first laser in 1992, one that replaces the scalpel in gum and other soft-tissue surgeries, and another laser approved by the FDA last year for use in teeth whitening.

The lows include the times Cozean and her husband, who teaches college math and computer science courses and runs a computer consulting business, had to use their personal credit cards to help fund the company payroll. The Cozeans weren’t the only ones who tapped their personal credit cards to keep the company afloat, but, she notes, “I was probably broker than most of the other company officials.”

Judy McCall, Premier’s director of human resources who has known Cozean and her family since the mid-’60s, recalls talking to Cozean about the “long, tedious process” of obtaining FDA approval of the laser: “Colette said, ‘It’s nothing compared to what we have ahead of us.’ She doesn’t dwell on the very positive or the very negative. She just moves on.”

Over the last five years, Premier Laser Systems has designed 20 laser products and a thousand hand pieces for delivering laser energy. The company is conducting clinical trials on an ophthalmic laser for treating cataracts. “That will be our next big [FDA] clearance,” says Cozean, who readily acknowledges that it doesn’t have the “pizazz of the dental laser.”

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Cozean wore braces as a teenager, but she managed to grow up without having to come in contact with a dental drill. That changed after her children were born and she found herself with a few cavities. Once in the chair, she refused to have a local anesthetic.

Two years ago, she unexpectedly found herself involved in the clinical trials for the dental laser. A demonstration of the system was planned at Premier’s New Jersey clinical site, but a storm had kept everyone stuck in Manhattan traffic. By the time they got to the dental office, all the patients had gone home.

So Cozean, who suspected that she might have had some cavities, volunteered to have the clinical evaluator give her a checkup. He found two.

She recalls: “I remember sitting down in the chair and he’s probing with his probe and he’s asking every one of the dentists in the room, which might have been 10, to come and see how deep the cavity was. So I had all these people looking in my mouth. In the meantime, I’m trying to do some business with one of my board members, so we’re sitting there talking with this probe sticking in my mouth.

“The next thing I heard was, ‘Would you like me to do the other one?’ and it dawned on me that I had heard the laser fire up, but I thought it was warming up. He had replaced the hand piece for his probe and actually finished the first cavity preparation in about 10 to 20 seconds and he was done. . . . I was in and out of his chair, even with all of his demonstrations, with two cavities in about 10 minutes. So I was a believer from that point on.”

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The past couple of years have required Cozean to travel more than she’d like. Last year alone she went to 37 countries to meet with international distributors and to teach courses in how to use the lasers and to speak at conferences.

She plans to return home the evening of her children’s last day of school and in time for her son’s birthday. Then the entire family heads for a weeklong backpacking trip to Yosemite. ‘That’s my vacation,” she says. “It’s a great way to get away from the phones.”

Sometimes, however, work even manages to interfere with family outings. Premier’s McCall remembers the Cozeans’ camping trip to a Christian interdenominational campground in the San Bernardino Mountains last year when an underwriter required Cozean’s presence at an investor-group meeting.

“A limousine was sent for her that had to pick her up at 5 a.m.,” McCall says. “They whisked her down the hill to the meeting and she was back at camp for a noon meal with her family. It’s pretty typical of her. She takes everything in stride.”

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No Needles, No Drills

Recently approved laser technology replaces the dreaded dental drill with a quiet painless method of treating cavities. How it works:

1. Erbium laser vaporized damaged portion of tooth and kills cavity-causing bacteria.

2. Laser clears away small amount of tooth structure to create space for filling material that matches tooth color. Average amount of time required to this point 60 seconds

3. Filling applied and hardened by an argon laser.

* Source: Premier Laser Systems

* Researched by JANICE L. JONES / Los Angeles Times