What do studies on ape language, the biological basis of schizophrenia and the neurological damage wrought by Alzheimer's have in common? Many are made possible by sophisticated brain cell analysis software developed by MBF Bioscience Inc.

Founded in 1987 by a father-son team, the Williston, Vt.-based life science technology company might be relatively small, with around 35 employees, but it's having an outsize impact on neuroscience.

The company's bread and butter is its software for stereology, a technique that lets you obtain quantitative estimates of a population based on a sample. Originally developed in the 19th century for mining, the technique is paying off for the biological sciences, too. MBF Bioscience says one of its flagship programs, Stereo Investigator, has been cited in more than 1,000 peer-reviewed articles.

"I like to say it's a good way to make accurate, unbiased estimates of quantities, rather than make direct measurement of quantities," Jack Glaser, the company's president, told DOTmed News.

As Glaser explains it, you basically look at a few 2-D sections of some 3-D thing - a brain or a rock, for example - and then through random sampling you're able to extrapolate what the whole thing is like from those sections. In the case of MBF Bioscience's applications, it's largely to obtain numerical estimates of cell populations and structure of neurons.

Glaser compares the process to political polling. Much as with estimating the results of an election, you don't ask all of the individual voters whom they're voting for. Instead, you carefully sample a handful of them, say 300, and if you use the right tools, you can get an estimate, within a certain margin of error, of what the outcome will be.

"It's a way you can estimate things without counting them all up," Glaser said.

From the size of a closet to the size of your palm

Stereo Investigator launched about 15 years ago, but roots of the company stretch back to the mid-1960s and the work of Glaser's father, Dr. Edmund Glaser, a neuroscientist.

At that time, Glaser's dad developed a kind of computer-microscope to bring some quantitative rigor to anatomical studies of the brain, in an effort to develop 3-D neuron reconstructions.

"A lot of anatomy was done qualitatively by people describing what they saw," Glaser said. "My dad was a visionary at that time. He thought the only way you'll be able to identify small changes not visible to the eye was to measure things."

Later, in the mid-1980s, when 3-D reconstructions of the brain had become more refined, performing these functions was limited to only a handful of laboratories around the world due to the expense of the computers needed to do the analysis. The operations could only be handled by huge, closet-sized machines, called DEC computers, which cost upward of $100,000 and required a live programmer on premises to run.

That's when father and son got together.

"We thought, rather than have these very complicated computer systems and every lab its own programmer, the way to go would be to develop software useful for multiple labs," Glaser said. "The goal was to design affordable software to allow research in the neuron reconstruction field. They would save a lot of money buying our software."

In time, this led to the development of Neurolucida, MBF Bioscience's inaugural, and still best-selling, piece of software. By helping researchers map out brain cells and measure differences between brain regions, the program has led to some surprising revelations. For instance, researchers can learn what happens in the brains of pregnant women.

"When women become pregnant, they get more of these small neuron protuberances called dendritic spines. They play a large role in how people remember things, forming tiny synapses with other cells," Glaser said.

Now, more than 1,000 labs run MBF Bioscience software, according to the company. And those old DEC behemoths?

"Your cell phone is more powerful than that computer," Glaser said.

Savings and new markets

MBF Bioscience has branches in Europe and Japan, but like other life science and technology companies, it has its eye on China, which Glaser says is ramping up its R&D.

"Our newest office this year is in China," Glaser said. "We're in Hong Kong and Taiwan and Shanghai, and we're hoping to expand more in China as well."

Also, five years ago, it launched a sister company, MBF Labs, to do contract research for pharmaceutical companies and other groups. This is not just another source of revenue, Glaser said. It also helps them refine their products.

"It's also nice to see people in our office using our software - they are doing what our customers are doing, except it generates this really great synergy, where our programmers can sit down with people using the software," Glaser said. "It's like having a customer in your own house."

But the company certainly isn't immune from the shocks of the economy. Glaser estimates that 60 to 70 percent of its U.S. customers depend on grants from the National Institutes of Health, a government body whose funds can dip in lean times.

But Glaser says the company works hard to cut costs and attract customers. It got a name change six years ago, when MicroBrightField was shortened to simply MBF Bioscience. The rationale? Inclusiveness.

"Brightfield is a form of microscopy," Glaser said. "We decided that name was limiting because people thought of us as a great system for brightfield, but what if they had a confocal microscope?"

There's also no lack of inventiveness. Most interestingly, the company has found a green, lean way to keep the server room cool during the winter: by using chilly Vermont air. The temperature in the room, with about 10 servers, has to be kept low enough for the computers to function. So previously, the company had been chilling them with air conditioning, even in the midst of a frigid north country winter.

"One of our employees and I were talking one day," Glaser recounts. "Doesn't it seem weird that it's like 20 below outside, and we have an air conditioner running in here? Why don't we run a ventilation outside - that's easy to do."

A few weeks later, they had rigged a system that would pump in and fan out cold air from outside whenever the room temperature rose above about 75 degrees.

"Immediately, we could see our winter power bill went down by 25 percent," Glaser said. "It paid for itself in less than one year."