SUCCESS IN FOCUS; MICROSCOPE COMPANY SAVORING CONTRACT WITH UCLA INSTITUTE.

Byline: Ben Sullivan Daily News Staff Writer

It was the medical contract of the year for McBain Instruments, maybe of the decade.

After months of planning, presentations and negotiations, the Chatsworth-based microscope maker and distributor was chosen last year by the University of California, Los Angeles, to stock and service a new, state-of-the-art imaging center at the college's prestigious Brain Research Institute.

When fully operational, the center will give campus scientists access to dozens of sophisticated machines that, among other things, use laser light to image individual cells as they work, without damaging the tissue. The applications range from AIDS research to the study of brain tumors and multiple sclerosis.

It wasn't the center's price tag that made the project so attractive to McBain. Over five years the project will bring several hundred thousand dollars in sales to the firm, but McBain already provides more than $20 million worth of equipment to the electronics and biomedicine sectors annually.

The real draw was the chance to create a high-profile showcase for McBain's razzle-dazzle products and, in the process, cozy up to the UCLA name.

McBain is not losing money on the deal, but ``we gave them extremely advantageous pricing and are basically treating them like a long-lost cousin,'' said Michael Crump, the company's director of sales who served as point man in talks with the school.

The feeling appears to be mutual. In getting top-notch equipment and round-the-clock service at a bargain-basement price, UCLA officials say they've struck a rare balance between serving the needs of academia and industry.

The idea for the center, which last month opened as the Carol Moss Spivak Imaging Core Facility, came in early 1997 when Dr. Anthony Campagnoni, associate director of the brain institute, realized that the facility's single confocal microscope was serving the entirety of UCLA's neuroscience staff - a crew of more than 200 researchers from 25 different departments.

Not only was demand on the high-powered machine heavy, but the microscope itself was, year by year, falling further behind the technological curve.

``We wanted to find a mechanism to bring us up to state of the art, or at least of the commercial art, and it was my idea . . . that we could have a competition,'' Campagnoni said.

The high-end microscope market is controlled by four firms from two countries: Japan's Olympus and Nikon; and Germany's Carl Zeiss and Leica Microsystems. U.S. companies once ranked equally high, but names like American Optical and Bausch & Lomb were, over the years, acquired by or merged with larger players.

After the better part of a year arranging funding for the center and establishing competitive ground rules, Campagnoni sought out local distributors of the Big Four, asking each to provide its vision of what shape such a university-industry collaboration would take.

Campagnoni said he wanted the firms to fight for the right to become ``the sole supplier of the best equipment they had to offer.''

``It was brutal,'' said Crump, whose company represents Leica. McBain, whose founder, Carl McBain, is coincidentally a UCLA graduate, put hundreds of hours

into preparing its three-hour presentation, going so far as to fly in extra help from out of state.

The presentation, in September 1997, went without a hitch. But then the questions began. What warranties can you offer? How about pricing? And, after all, what's so great about your machines?

What little consolation McBain could take from the ordeal came from the knowledge that the firm's three competitors were facing the same onslaught.

Campagnoni and his advisers eventually winnowed the field down to McBain and a firm representing Zeiss, and each was asked to bring in its equipment for a series of test drives. Given that Zeiss and Leica are ``the equivalent of Mercedes and a Lexus,'' however, Campagnoni said it was support and service that proved the deciding factor.

With the advent of computer chips in the 1960s and '70s, high-end microscopes left the realm of free-standing machines and became highly modulized devices, with pricey peripherals mixed and matched to achieve the desired technique.

In managing the dozens of modules a center like UCLA's brain institute would need, ``We hadn't realized how important having a local supplier would be,'' Campagnoni said. Having access to technicians familiar with all the parts and located just a few miles away became crucial.

Though open less than a month and not yet stocked with its centerpiece - a $200,000-plus multiphoton scanning microscope that can study cells deep within a tissue sample - the imaging center already is starting to pay marketing dividends, Crump said.

In addition to making the center available to potential McBain clients for real-world demonstrations, UCLA officials say students who leave to start their own businesses often buy the same brand of equipment on which they were trained.

``We're trying to use the publicity as much as we can, using the name of UCLA and of the core facility . . . and we're seeing some coattails,'' Crump said.

CAPTION(S):

3 Photos

PHOTO (1--Color) Images of cells are displayed on a computer monitor as UCLA's Dr. Anthony Campagnoni uses a state-of-the-art confocal microscope by McBain Instruments of Chatsworth.

Andy Holzman/Daily News

(2--Color) Matthew Schibler observes while Campagnoni uses the McBain microscope at the Carol Moss Spivak Imaging Core Facility at the University of California, Los Angeles.

(3) Carl McBain, left, president of McBain Instruments, and Michael Crum, director of sales, display some of the Chatsworth company's microscopic imaging products.

Myung J. Chun/Daily News