Focus: The trick to further growing Cleveland's medical industry

CLEVELAND -- There's a company in Mayfield that is quietly doubling their employee base every 18 months or so.

QED is a prototype for what Cleveland hopes becomes the future of the local bio-med industry. They make state of the art magnetic coils that are used to build MRI machines, which take pictures inside the human body.

The CEO of QED is Case Western Reserve University alum, Hiroyuki Fujita.

"A year ago we had 25 employees, today we have 40," he says. "A year from now we will probably have 80."

They are in the midst of moving to a new facility that more than triples their square footage -- one that Fujita thinks he may outgrow by early next decade.

QED is less than four years old, and last year did $6 million is sales.

"We have been very lucky and fortunate," Fujita says.

That luck and fortune began in a basement laboratory at the Case Western Reserve School of Physics 10 years ago.

Fujita and Professor Dr. Robert Brown were part of a MRI club that gave way to QED. That is the business model Cleveland's leadership hopes to duplicate as the city become more and more reliant on the medical industry.

"We need more of us," Brown says.

The "us" he is talking about are the physics-minded graduates who are some of the few in the marketplace turning down job offers.

"I don't even write letters of recommendation anymore -- they just get hired," Browns says

The job Cleveland has to do is make sure these minds stay in Cleveland, and like Fujita did, open businesses and create new industry in a city banking on a future rooted in the medical industry.