Dr. Gary Jernberg and Mary Jeanne Jernberg

Photo: Daniel Dinsmore

Labor of Love

North Mankato couple researches, tests, and blends a complex concoction of pharmaceutical, medical, and fast food businesses.

Feelings in Mary Jeanne Jernberg of ardent admiration for her husband bubbled up and out like artesian well water. In our Connect Business Magazine interview, she spoke of her “best friend” and “companion” and how their separate business careers had been set afire by mutual support. In kind, husband Gary framed his wife and himself as “absolutely best friends” who were “so much in love with each other.”

They worked each other through college, were tag-team parents raising children, and continue to be co-cheerleaders reaching high. This lasting love affair has carried Dr. Gary and Mary Jeanne Jernberg along through life, and their business successes have been a by-product—and what a by-product it is.

For starters, Mary Jeanne has transformed a 3M medical researcher career and a Minnesota State MBA into her and her son currently co-owning ten restaurants, including nine Subway locations. They make more than mayonnaise and tuna on wheat. They mentor 140 employees. Her home office is in North Mankato.

Gary merged chemical engineering and dental school degrees into Mankato-based Southern Minnesota Periodontics, and on the side became perhaps our region’s most productive inventor. The titles of his many patents may seem bland, such as the vanilla-sounding “Local delivery of agents for disruption and inhibition of bacterial biofilm for treatment of periodontal disease,” but really they are anything but bland. For example, his patent to treat periodontitis became the outrageously successful Arestin, the flagship product of licensee OraPharma, which is owned by $3.6 billion Valeant Pharmaceuticals International. Boston Scientific has used his intellectual property in its cardiac stents. Other Jernberg inventions have the potential to pale past successes, including red-hot technology that could eliminate any need for fluoride in toothpaste.

They have grown their businesses with each other, side-by-side, supporting and encouraging, holding hands, Mary Jeanne and Gary. Theirs have been labors of love.

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CONNECT: Where did you two meet?

Mary Jeanne: After returning from a trip out West, my college roommate and I went out with others for the evening to talk about the trip. Gary happened to be at the same place with his friends.

Gary: It was unusual because this nightspot was 15 to 20 miles from each of our homes. Neither of us had been there before. It was a chance meeting.

CONNECT: So you just walked up to her and said, Want to dance?

Gary: Yes. I had just returned from a business trip helping start a chemical processing plant in Iowa, working long hours, and was home for the weekend. I was tired that night and didn’t want to go out with my friends. But they convinced me. So the place had a nice band, and I just saw her, and thought, Wow! I asked her to dance. She was kind enough not to turn me down.

CONNECT: What do you like about your wife?

Gary: Everything. She’s optimistic. She has a heart of gold. She’s always thinking of others. She has a delightful sense of humor and likes to tease.

CONNECT: Give an example of her heart of gold?

Gary: She had an employee who was going through a difficult illness, was separated from her husband, and had children. Over Christmas, the employee needed hospitalization. No one was there with her kids. So Mary Jeanne made sure they had a Christmas tree to decorate. She bought Christmas presents for the kids and spent time there.

CONNECT: What do you admire about her regarding business?

Gary: She’s the brains in our marriage. (Mary Jeanne laughs.) Some people have a skill set in which they can do certain things well, but she can do just about anything when putting her mind to it. When I met her, she was one of only a few in her University of Minnesota pharmacology group doing basic research on kidney metabolism. The kidneys are major metabolic organs. She tested drugs in animal models. Under a microscope, she could do the microsurgery to remove a rat kidney, keep it alive, and profuse drugs through the kidney to see how the drug would metabolize. Her surgical skills were impeccable. No one else there could do it.

Mary Jeanne: After I left the University of Minnesota, they asked me to come back at night because the PhD graduate students were having difficulty with the surgical and kidney perfusion method. I was working at a new job in drug metabolism with 3M Riker Laboratories.

Gary: She was excellent with pharmaceutical testing and research, and extremely good at these surgical procedures. When we met about 1970, I visited to see what she did at work and to take her out to lunch. She was the one who turned me on to medical research. That’s one reason I switched careers to being a periodontist.

CONNECT: Now Mary Jeanne, it’s your opportunity to embarrass him. What do you admire most about him?

Mary Jeanne: He’s bright, a quick thinker, and a wonderful father, husband, and role model for our children. He sets a good example for them to follow. He helped them with science projects and spent lots of time with them at the ice rink in Mankato for ice hockey and figure skating. He took an active role as a father. He’s also a great companion and my best friend.

Gary: That goes the other way, too. We are absolutely best friends. We are so much in love and think the world of each other.

CONNECT: You both started out in similar careers, and both went into something completely different. Mary Jeanne, what was there about your original career as a researcher that enhances what you do now with co-owning nine Subway restaurants?

Mary Jeanne: Every job I’ve had prepared me for success. As a researcher, I learned time management skills and the ability to work with different types of personalities. At 3M Riker Laboratories, I worked with the people that came up with the formulas for chemicals we used, others doing bench research, and others that wrote the end result. I learned to work as part of a team. As a business owner, if you can mesh personalities, learn what people are good at, seize what they are good at, and put that all together in one package, you will have a great product. I loved working for the University of Minnesota (medical school, department of pharmacology) and 3M Riker Laboratories. I went to work every day to play. It was never a job and always exciting. When we moved to Mankato in 1980 because of Gary’s career, I suddenly didn’t have the same work opportunities. I could have commuted, but we had small children to raise. I decided to get an MBA at Minnesota State and merge that with my scientific knowledge to create other opportunities. I graduated from MSU in 1989 and started teaching finance in the College of Business.

CONNECT: And you did merge that with other opportunities. You started Orange Julius and Karmelkorn franchises soon thereafter at River Hills Mall. That was different than being a researcher.

Mary Jeanne: Basically, 3M Riker Laboratories was all about putting things together in a test tube. At Orange Julius, we were putting fruit into blender bowls. The reason I started Orange Julius was to send our children to college because I had witnessed my parents struggling to help make my tuition payments. By then, I had a nice job at MSU and this was an extra side job. The other reason was to teach our children responsibility. It taught them time management skills because they had to balance school, sports, and their jobs.

CONNECT: Children seem your top priority.

Gary: Absolutely, number one.

CONNECT: I have heard some business owners talk as if they have to sacrifice one for the other, meaning if they spend more time with their children they will have less for their business. Somehow you two have been able to execute a good balance.

Gary: I would say so. When she started Orange Julius, she was a professor at MSU as well.

Mary Jeanne: I taught finance in the MSU College of Business about three years. I really enjoyed working with young people. They often were afraid of the finance class and many thought they were going to fail, but within the first few days I usually could help them get comfortable. Then I was given the opportunity to move out of teaching and into the graduate school to direct its programs until 1998. That year, our oldest son, who had already graduated from high school and was attending college, really wanted to become an entrepreneur. So we purchased two more Orange Julius/Dairy Queen stores.

CONNECT: Gary, what things in your background and career as a chemical engineer with General Mills and Ecolab influence what you do today?

Gary: I grew up in a working class neighborhood on the east side of St. Paul. It would have been a struggle for me to pay for college. I was the first person to get a four-year scholarship from the Hull Foundation, which gave scholarships to deserving students from needy families. Now I’m a Hull Foundation trustee. For my education, I chose the Institute of Technology, University of Minnesota, and wanted to be a chemical engineer. I sang in a rock band and during summers worked on the factory line at Whirlpool.

I started off with General Mills before going to Ecolab, where I worked on a project to produce non-phosphate detergents to reduce water pollution. Eutrophication occurs when phosphates, such as fertilizers, go into lake and river water and create algae blooms that can kill fish. The Great Lakes were dying. I was able to successfully design a non-phosphate detergent using microparticles via spray drying.

That was just after meeting Mary Jeanne. I then realized I was very interested in what she was doing, and thought of going to medical or dental school, but decided on dental because that allowed me to do things with my hands. I chose periodontics because it was a relatively new field. After graduating in 1980, I decided to work on an invention because I didn’t want to scrap my engineering education entirely. So that’s when I patented what eventually became the Arestin product for treatment of periodontal disease. OraPharma was formed to develop and market it.

CONNECT: Arestin was your first invention. What exactly was there about your background as a chemical engineer that had given you this unique insight into inventing it?

Gary: Dentistry has traditionally used a mechanical mode of treatment. You do things with your hands. You scale teeth. You extract teeth. You do restorations on teeth. But there was a pharmacological need. The problem was that bacteria form biofilms resistant to antibiotic penetration. They have mechanisms for preventing antibiotics from getting in, so you need super-high concentrations of antibiotics to fight them. I was able to devise a method to get the concentrations very high, and exactly where the antibiotic was needed.

CONNECT: As opposed to marinating the whole body with antibiotics.

Gary: Right. Targeted deliveries like this are in vogue now. I was able to devise microparticles to be flowable and smart in the body, adhere when damped with fluid, and distribute the medication in a high concentration in with time duration. That’s where the engineering came in. That was my first invention and now it’s the number one selling product of its kind in the world. That was a good starting point to keep inventing. I didn’t want to be a one-trick pony.

CONNECT: Your invention of Arestin must have opened a lot of doors for you.

Gary: Many companies are aware of my past work when I contact them. I also get occasional contacts from companies interested in having me work with them or help them solve problems. For example, I have a patent licensed by Boston Scientific for use in cardiac stents for drug elution or timed release of a drug to keep stents open.

The process where arteries become blocked is called stenosis. Originally, metal stents were placed in arteries to prop them open, but in about half the cases the vessels would restenose or become blocked again. So various agents were used to keep them open. Eventually, drugs and polymer coatings were used to radically reduce this rate of restenosis. Boston Scientific licensed my patent, along with other intellectual properties, to provide a proper delivery scheme for these drugs. My mother had had quadruple bypass surgery in the 1990s, so this technology was personally important and satisfying to me.

CONNECT: Other doors?

Another patent I have was licensed to W.L. Gore & Associates, which has a medical division making artificial vascular grafts.

A project I’m working on right now involves bacterial biofilms. The Centers for Disease Control estimates the majority of human infections are bacterial biofilm infections. The bacteria form colonies and extra-cellular matrix components as a survival mechanism to help fend off the body’s self-defense system. I have signed a license agreement with Unilever in London and Amsterdam to couple my patent applications with theirs to deal with inhibition of bacteria in the forming of biofilms.

Bacteria are single-celled organisms. They can land on a surface, such as a urinary catheter, lung, or a periodontal location. They elicit quorum-sensing molecules, which signal them to form colonies with protective extra-cellular polymer matrix scaffolding for their survival and protection. Then they switch on virulence factors that might lead to infection.

I have coupled my intellectual property with Unilever, which has acquired the intellectual property of an Australian start-up company spun off from the University of New South Wales. Two of their professors were out scuba diving off the coast. One was a marine biologist. There are lots of bacteria in seawater and seaweeds usually get a coating of bacteria. But there was one species of seaweed that was totally clear of bacteria. The marine biologist snipped some fronds, and later found they contained a group of compounds that antagonize the quorum-sensing molecules of bacteria. The bacteria would land on the surface of this seaweed and just leave without colonizing. This was a major breakthrough because the compound didn’t kill the bacteria—it just told them to go away naturally.

So the Australians and I got in touch. I signed a joint agreement with their company. They then sold the technology to Unilever. Today, I have the rights in oral applications in dental materials and Unilever has rights for other applications. As for the oral applications, I have conducted and sponsored research at the University of Minnesota.

CONNECT: As I see it, this product could have far more potential than Arestin.

Gary: Possibly. We have put this product in testing into composite white tooth restorations because they are the most commonly used in the world. We blended in the inhibitory compounds at a 3 percent level and ran in vitro tests with a bacterium called S. mutans, which is the main tooth decay bacteria. We ran plugs of this blended composite material in a biofilm chamber and compared them to control fillings that didn’t have the inhibitor. We had a 99.5 percent reduction in biofilm. We were able to bind the inhibitory compounds to the composite materials so they won’t wash away. They will have long time duration. The goal of this research is to extend the lifetime of dental restorations. Presently, dental restorations last on average six years—and fail because of secondary tooth decay around the restoration. We could also use these compounds to repel bacteria in orthodontic bracket coatings where patients get white spot lesions, in implant abutments, on denture coatings, and more.

Through an agreement with the State University of New York, I have another project that involves dispersion of bacteria from biofilms. A researcher there discovered the molecule bacteria employ to disperse from biofilms once they have formed. With Unilever, the idea was to inhibit these bacteria from forming biofilms, but with SUNY the compound tells the bacteria to disperse and go away. With this technology, I have the shared rights to oral care applications. There are medical and industrial applications, too.

CONNECT: These compounds could be put into toothpastes and mouthwashes.

Gary: My rights with Unilever will not be for personal care, but for dentist-applied materials, but with SUNY it is for all of those things including toothpaste. So we are actively pursuing licensees—third parties to license these technologies and take them through regulatory pathways.

CONNECT: Years ago while working for a health and beauty aids brokerage, I sold toothpaste. I knew about recent developments then in toothpaste, such as the emergence of tartar control and whitening products. But what you are talking about is on another planet. This is revolutionary.

Gary: Yes, it possibly is. We are talking with companies to get them interested in licensing this technology from us and taking it through regulatory pathways worldwide.

CONNECT: Mary Jeanne, let’s talk about you. You started off with one Orange Julius and a Karmelkorn at River Hills Mall.

Mary Jeanne: At one time I had four stores. I still have an Orange Julius/Dairy Queen Treat Center in St. Cloud. I used to have stores at Southdale Center, and in Duluth and Mankato. I sold those stores in 2004 and expanded with Subway. I had started with Subway in 1998—after researching various franchisee opportunities and looking for a health food option. When I started, Subway had 7,000 locations, and now has about 40,000 worldwide. I really enjoy the activity of wearing lots of hats.

CONNECT: Such as?

Mary Jeanne: I oversee the operation, hire management, do financials and lease negotiations, and negotiate new projects with the bank. I deal with building construction and tenant improvements. I typically do some of each every day. I like challenges and would be bored otherwise. The more things I have on my plate, the happier I am.

Many times, we are the ones giving young people their first job, and then get to watch them blossom. We have some that started at age 16 and are still working after graduating from college. They work up the ranks. Some even have moved on to own their own store. My son Mike and I have nine Subways in and near Rochester, about 140 employees, and three support staff working out of my office from our North Mankato home.

Gary: Our son is an excellent mentor and role model. These young employees really look up to him.

CONNECT: Gary, when you have all these other revolutionary things going on, doesn’t your work as a periodontist seem a bit pedestrian?

Gary: I really enjoy what I do. Periodontal disease is the world’s main cause of adults losing teeth. It’s also a risk factor for systemic diseases such as heart attack and stroke. I have a wonderful staff and have been here 32 years. I love working with people. The work I do here gives me immediate gratification, whereas some projects I do as an inventor might take twenty years to develop.

In my periodontal business, the vast majority of referrals I get are from the dental community in an area that includes southern Minnesota and northern Iowa. Last year, we had 150 referring dentists. I enjoy helping people.

CONNECT: Gary, you mentioned in our interview years ago that you best enjoyed “the hunt.” What did you mean?

Gary: It’s one thing to get a patent, but another to develop a prototype, negotiate licenses, do clinical testing, and get FDA approval. You have to find a company that wants to invest the money, time, and personnel to take these products through regulatory trials. That can take decades. That’s the hunt.

CONNECT: From what I understand, it took a great deal of funding to bring Arestin to market over 20 years.

Gary: We were using an existing drug called minocycline hydrochloride (an antibiotic). It wasn’t a new drug. We were using a new delivery system. The cost would have been considerably higher to get regulatory approval of a new drug.

CONNECT: It seems like such a risk. A pharmaceutical company could spend hundreds of millions of dollars over decades and then a competitor could bring in a product to make all that time and effort worthless.

Mary Jeanne: I saw that all the time when I was working with 3M. You might have five products that all looked like they could be fabulous. Then we started testing, and that would wash out four of the five, and then five years later the fifth would be washed out. Then all of a sudden you have spent a huge sum and have nothing to show for it. People don’t understand what is going on behind the scenes in drug research and development.

CONNECT: Mary Jeanne, explain your decision-making process in getting involved in Subway?

Mary Jeanne: Like I said, I was looking for something healthy that could be profitable, had a good track record, and would be around awhile. Some franchises go by the wayside. Like with pharmaceutical companies, you can have a concept, and spend money, and have nothing to show for it in five years. I wanted something with a proven track record. I interviewed a number of franchisees—not just with Subway. I had a business plan, and had to approach banks and get qualified to become a franchisee. You just don’t walk in and become one. Becoming a Subway franchisee involves being trained at their corporate offices in Connecticut. If after three weeks you don’t pass the training, you can’t become a franchisee.

Gary and I support each other in our decisions. Of course, I wouldn’t have spent money like that without his support because owning so many restaurants was going to take time from the other things we do as a couple. I have always supported his decisions and he has supported mine.

When I was trying to learn more about Subway, some (franchisees) were happy to talk about sales and profitability up to a point, but I wasn’t in their system and they were more guarded. I could have been a future competitor. It took a while to find people willing to share about their business. You still can’t learn everything from them.

CONNECT: How do you make your decisions?

Gary: When I was done with dental school in 1980, we were looking at moving to San Diego or Colorado Springs. But a group of dentists from Mankato invited us down, including Gary Eichmeyer, John Kanyusik, and Jim Walton. They encouraged us to start a practice in Mankato. A big factor in our decision was that our kids’ grandparents wanted us close to them. We were both 33 and had a young family and wanted to become established. Mankato was a “virgin” area for my field. It didn’t have a periodontist.

As for my interest in invention, I was keeping up on my chemical engineering background, and did a lot of reading and investigating—not only in my field, but in medicine and peripheral fields.

We would go on vacation to the Virgin Islands where Mary Jeanne and the kids and I would have fun. It was really laid back. Often while there, I would get an idea for an invention. It would just be a spark of innovation that would come from virtually nowhere and I would have to chase the idea down. I have developed most of the ideas for my inventions myself. I have two patent attorney groups in the Twin Cities and lately have had collaborations with other inventors and companies to add strength to what I’m doing and speed the process.

CONNECT: What do you two do outside of work together?

Gary: It’s important as a married couple to stay in touch. We go for long walks and have date nights. We both like golf—and are pretty bad at it—and spending time with friends.

Mary Jeanne: I’m putting in more hours now than Gary. My stores don’t close until 10 p.m. and some open at 6 a.m. I don’t have office staff working after 2:30 p.m. If a call comes in, and there is a disaster, I have to attend to it. As an owner, you can’t quit at 5:00 p.m. One reason I like having my work office at home—I could have my own building—is when getting an important call at 6:00 p.m., for instance, I don’t have to drive to my office for information.

CONNECT: What gives you two the most satisfaction in life?

Gary: The Hull Foundation, of which I’m a trustee, has been a great way to lift up young people. The area where I grew up in St. Paul is pretty rough today. It’s diverse demographically. It’s great seeing how some of these kids at Johnson High and Harding High have been resilient and successful after having gone through adversity.

Mary Jeanne: I’ve encouraged my children to reach for the sky and do the best they can with their skills. Gary has never put a roadblock in front of me, and I have never put a roadblock in front of him in terms of each of us reaching for the sky. We worked each other through college.

CONNECT: Neither of you would have done this well in life without the other.

Gary: That’s a big part of our success. We are each other’s best advocates.

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Mary Jeanne Bio

Mary Jeanne Jernberg grew up on a farm in west central Minnesota and graduated from St. Francis High School. She graduated from St. Cloud State with a biology/chemistry degree in 1969. She went on to work in the University of Minnesota Medical School pharmacology department for three years before joining Riker Labs, owned by 3M.

Said Mary Jeanne, “I was a senior biochemical pharmacologist and did pharmaceutical research for (3M) nine years until Gary graduated from dental school. We have three children, Michael, who is in business with me; Anne, a dentist; and Timothy, who recently graduated from dental school.”

Getting to know you: Mary Jeanne Jernberg

Education: St. Francis High School (Little Falls), 1965; St. Cloud State, BS in biology/chemistry, 1969; and Minnesota State, MBA, 1989.

Organizational involvement: Phi Beta Kappa, member; Subway marketing, board member.

Getting to know you: Gary Jernberg

Education: Johnson High School (St. Paul), 1965; University of Minnesota, BCE, 1969; University of Minnesota, DDS, 1978; University of Minnesota, MS, periodontology, 1980).

Organizational involvement: Minnesota Dental Association, American Dental Association, Minnesota Association of Periodontists, American Academy of Periodontology, and Hull Foundation (trustee).