OR device inspired by the bionic man

Dr. John Frangioni invented an imaging system that could change the way cancer surgery is done. (Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff)

"Why can't I remember that?" John Frangioni said recently as he puzzled over one of the important figures from his childhood: Did the bionic man on the '70s television show cost $6 million or $7 million?

Either way, the money is a side note (Steve Austin was the "Six Million Dollar Man," by the way). What was important was "the idea that you could help people by building devices," Frangioni said recently in his basement laboratory at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where he is building a device that could potentially help lots and lots of people.

"That show had a huge influence on me," he said, laughing. "But really, the idea has stayed with me - that you could have an impact by applying physical sciences to medicine."

For Frangioni, who's as scrappy as a cat in a dog fight, the story seems too quaint: a working class kid, the son of a meat cutter and a secretary in Arlington, gets inspired by a TV show; commits himself to engineering, biology, and medicine; earns a wall full of diplomas from Harvard; and now runs his own lab building sci-fi medical tools. But, he says, it's the first part of the story that enabled the later ones.

"It's because I'm not afraid to go back to a blue-collar background," he said, "that I have nothing to lose in shooting for the moon."

After years of schooling (he has both an MD and a doctorate) and nine years in the lab, the 44-year-old Frangioni is finally taking his big shot: He has created an imaging system that has the potential to change the operating room, and it's about to go through human trials.

The system is known as the Flare, and it involves injecting a special chemical into a target - such as a cancerous tumor - and then using near-infrared light to highlight the target on a monitor.

By visually separating the bad from the good, it is designed to help surgeons remove all of the diseased tissue while leaving behind the healthy tissue.

The system has been described as "cutting by color," but Frangioni prefers the phrase "seeing is curing" because he thinks cutting is just the start.

"If we can drag a light bulb to the cancer, why not drag a bomb that can kill it?" he said. "But that's in the future. This decade is the seeing decade. The next decade is for curing."

Dr. Yolonda Colson, director of the Women's Lung Cancer Center at Brigham and Women's Hospital, is about to use the system in a surgical trial and shares Frangioni's enthusiasm.

"Right now, we don't have a very good way to find lymph nodes that might have early signs of cancer," she said. "The beauty of his system is that with a very low amount of a chemicals that are safe, we can watch it move in real time and find the lymph nodes most likely to have cancer."

"That's a huge difference," Colson said. "It has the potential to change how we treat lung cancer, which is the biggest killer for both men and women."

Human trials are, for Frangioni, quite a milestone in the marathon that has been his scientific life. A big theme of his lab - where they're developing both the imaging system and the chemical agents - is, "What's clinically realistic?"

"There are a lot of science fiction ideas that we can come up with that aren't practical, but we don't waste time on that," he said as he pulled out a five-page commentary he recently published in the journal Nature Biotechnology. The article is titled, "The impact of greed on academic medicine and patient care."

"I didn't make a lot of friends with this, but that's not why I'm here," said Frangioni, who hopes to get the imaging system into surgeons' hands for just $30,000 per system and will make the design documents available for free on the Internet.

"In academic medicine, we're supposed to take taxpayer dollars and do good medicine for the taxpayer. I didn't train this long not to give it back to the patients. I've watched people suffer and die and I know I can do better."

And if it fails?

"I can always," he said, "go back to who I was."

Hometown: Arlington; lives in Wayland.

Education: Frangioni got his undergraduate degree in engineering from Harvard in 1986, a PhD in cell biology from Harvard Medical School in 1993, and an MD from the Harvard/MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology program in 1994.

Family: Wife, Wendy Johnson, is a cardiologist at South Shore Hospital. They have three children: Liana, 10; Julia, 8; and Nicolas, 2.

Hobbies: Frangioni said he has a small group of family and friends that he enjoys spending time with. "Other than that, I'm consumed by my life and family."