Pharmaceutical innovation inspiration

By Nick Pryke

With pipelines drying up and companies looking outside their traditional fields of inspiration to conjure up new innovation ideas, NGP though it would be a good idea to inspire you with some of the best – and worst – innovations and inventions of the 20th century.

1957: The pill

Currently used by more than 100 million women worldwide, the combined oral contraceptive pill, or COCP, was originally approved for public use in 1957 by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) under the name Envoid. Despite this approval, contraceptives were not available to married women until 1965 – with unmarried women having to wait a further seven years before they were able to use it – as the original Envoid had not been marketed as a contraceptive. Today’s standard dose ‘pill’ contains a third less estrogen than its rudimentary counterpart and has revolutionized choices for women worldwide.

1955: The polio vaccine

There are in fact two polio vaccines used throughout the world to combat poliovirus. The first was announced to the world by Jonas Salk in 1955 and consisted of an injected dose of the dead poliovirus, followed closely by an oral vaccine tested by Albert Sabin and approved in 1962. The key to stamping out polio, as was realized soon after the vaccines were created, was to interrupt the person-to-person transmission of the virus through vaccination, as its isolated survival outside of non-primate environments was found to be remote. With the help of Salk and Sabin, poliovirus has been reduced from an estimated 350,000 cases worldwide in 1988 to roughly 1600 in 2007. Good job gentlemen.

1905: E=mc2

If E is energy, m is mass and c is the speed of light in a vacuum – then Albert Einstein is a very clever man. And while he may not have been the first person to propose a mass – energy relationship, he was indeed the first scientist to interpret the mass – energy equivalence as a fundamental principle that follows from the symmetries of space and time. Essentially, the equation indicates that energy will always exhibit mass in whatever form the energy takes. Having proposed his equation in 1905, modern theory holds true to the cause by stating that from this, neither mass nor energy can be destroyed, only moved from one location to another. It has served the progression of countless theories and provided practical applications that will continue to fuel the fires of innovation for years to come.

1987: Automated sequencing machine

Perhaps one of the more difficult innovations to pin down in terms of credit, the first fully-automated sequencing machine was produced by Applied Biosystems in 1987 in collaboration with Leroy Hood and Lloyd Smith – who had also pioneered the first semi-automated sequencing machine the previous year. For the first time ever, it allowed for DNA sequencing to be performed with both speed and accuracy on a commercial scale. Where a person could produce a finished sequence of around 20,000 to 50,000 bases in roughly a year by hand, the new sequencing machines could reproduce the same results in a few hours – even the technique for sequencing stayed largely the same. It mapped the future for genome research and allowed scientists into areas previously thought to be untouchable.

GPS

Established in 1973 to overcome the limitations of previous navigation systems, the Global Positioning System (GPS) was created by the American Department of Defence. The system works through a space-based, global system of satellites that, provided there is an unobstructed line of sight to four or more GPS satellites, can transmit reliable time and location information in all weather conditions and at any time to a remote GPS device anywhere in the world. While the majority of us now use GPS in our cars to avoid having to wrestle with road maps, but the original inspiration was – believe it or not – the Sputnik launch in 1957. A team of US scientists realized that the frequency of the signal being transmitted by Sputnik adhered to the Doppler effect, allowing them to pinpoint where the satellite was along its orbit by measuring the Doppler distortion. Makes pushing that button on your sat-nav seem all the more easier.

Aerogel

Widely used in commercial circles, but perhaps best-known for NASA’s use of the substance, aerogel is a manufactured material with several remarkable properties; most notably as a thermal insulator and as the world’s lowest bulk density material of any known porous solid. Born out of a bet between Samuel Kistler and Charles Learned in 1931 to see who could replace the liquid in ‘jellies’ with gas without causing shrinkage, aerogels today are used for a variety of appliances throughout many industries; NASA, for example, use aerogels to trap space-dust particles aboard the Stardust spacecraft and also as a thermal insulator for the Mars Rover and their space suits. The material is produced by extracting the liquid component of a gel through supercritical drying, allowing the liquid to be slowly drawn off without causing the solid matrix in the gel to collapse. Simple.

Bionic contacts

Still in its development stages, the extremely sci-fi ‘bionic contacts’ hope to provide a virtual display that could one day be used for any number of uses – from helping the visually impaired to working within the video game industry. The lenses require organic materials that are biologically safe, while the electronic circuits are built from a layer of metal a few nanometers thick and light-emitting diodes a third of a millimeter across. Babak Parviz, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington, said: “Looking through a completed lens, you would see what the display is generating superimposed on the world outside.” Indeed, wireless communication, radio frequency power transmission and solar cells are all expected to be seen in future developments – quite literally.

The World Wide Web

What has now become the standardized entrance portal into the alternate reality we call the internet, actually started life as a proposal by Sir Tim Berners Lee in 1989. A few years later, and with all the necessary programs up to speed with Lee’s intentions, the World Wide Web was floated into the public domain in 1991. It is of interest to note here that while the terms World Wide Web and Internet are bandied around in everyday speech without much distinction, they are in fact completely separate in definition. The internet refers to a global system of interconnected computer networks, while the Web is an application that runs on the Internet. Remember that next time you’re rummaging through one of the 109.5 million currently operating websites.

Back to the drawing board:

Motorized surfboard: Those pesky ponds getting in your way to work again? No problem, just get yourself a motorized surfboard and stand proud in your bowler hat and suit while everybody else looks across with envy. Or at least that’s what Joe Gilpin thought would happen in 1948.

Baby cage: If you’re having space problems at home with a new addition to the family, then this is sure to add to them. An inventor from the 1930s thought it might be a good idea to hand out what were referred to as ‘baby cages’ to members of the Chelsea Baby Club in London, England. Essentially, it consisted of a wire cage that could be attached to the windows of high-rise apartments in order to give your little loved-ones time in the freshest of air, without any sense of worry about having your child in a box dangling over a busy street.

Phone-answering robot: You may be thinking, ‘we already have one of these – it’s called an answering machine’ – but you’d be wrong. Because the only thing the robot that Claus Scholz of Vienna invented in 1964 could do was to pick up the phone. It couldn’t speak, deliver messages or pass the phone to anybody else. And it was life-size.