To Your Health

By Mark Halper

WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM

Pioneers think big. It wasn't small-mindedness that led Lewis and Clark to conquer the Rocky Mountains, or Gordon Moore to predict the exponential growth of computing power. Name a challenge today, and chances are you will find a company with world-altering answers. Want proof? Meet some of the 2004 Tech Pioneers--this year's crop of 30 cutting-edge amazers, which will be announced this week by the World Economic Forum, prior to its annual meeting in Davos. They are working to combat AIDS, cancer, blindness and hunger. They're developing software that can keep track of anyone or anything, and new sources of power to wean the world from oil. Wish them luck.

On the rural outskirts of Hong Kong lies a site that was once a car-repair shop. Today it houses an experimental farm run by CK Life Sciences International. CK's chief technology officer, S.F. Pang, ambles around the lush, green grounds, extolling the virtues of one of the company's most successful products, NutriSmart fertilizer. NutriSmart is superefficient--a dose one-third the size of conventional chemical fertilizers provides the same crop yield--and because it's organic, it doesn't harm the environment. But most important, Pang insists, NutriSmart makes produce taste better. "Absolutely delicious," he purrs as he savors a handful of cherry tomatoes.

CK Life Sciences is part of a crop of this year's World Economic Forum Technology Pioneers, whose innovations are making the world a healthier place by tackling malnutrition, combating diseases like AIDS and cancer and preventing the leading mechanized cause of death, car crashes. Some of these pioneering firms--like Optobionics, a company based in Naperville, Ill., that is perfecting a microchip to help the blind see--have a decidedly cyborg bent. Others use advanced computer technology to stimulate humans into action, like the dashboard equipment from Seeing Machines that detects when drivers become drowsy and then jolts them awake. And companies like Gilead and Procognia are helping to find new drugs to stop the world's killer diseases. But what unites all these companies is the common desire to use the latest scientific and technological advances to improve our quality of life.

In 1990, when Alan Chow, founder of Optobionics, began developing the artificial retina that could help some blind people regain sight, bionic technology was mostly considered fantasy. "When we started, what we proposed was such a radically different approach to incurable eye disease that the idea was considered science fiction," says Chow, 50. But with 10 trial operations since 2000, Chow and Optobionics are inching closer to the regulatory nod that would usher their bionic device into the mainstream medical world.

Thirty million to 40 million people around the world suffer from retinitis pigmentosa or macular degeneration, two diseases in which the retina--a thin sheet of cells in the back of the eye--slowly loses its ability to convert light into the electrochemical signals that are transmitted to the visual centers of the brain. As the diseases progress, sufferers gradually lose more and more of their sight. First the peripheral vision goes, then light sensitivity narrows until one day their window on the world snaps completely shut. Once surgically placed in the eye, Chow's Artificial Silicon Retina (ASR)--a computer chip about the size of a pinhead--takes on the job of the retina's damaged photoreceptors. The ASR restores only functional--not total--vision and works just on patients with retinitis pigmentosa or macular degeneration, so it's not a cure for blindness. Nevertheless, Chow says, the 10 trial patients all have shown "moderate to substantial" improvement, and "one patient who had been able to see only shadows for years could make out the faces of his family." Chow, who co-founded his company six years ago with his brother Vincent, believes he's still five to 10 years away from making his bionic eye procedure generally available. First he has to win full regulatory approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. He also has to bring costs well below their current level, nearly $2 million per operation.

An equally breathtaking effort to use technology to supplement the body comes from MnemoScience of Aachen, Germany. The company is developing a thin strip of plastic that, once delivered into the body, can wrap and twist itself into just the right shape to help mend bones, open blood vessels and close wounds. Mnemo's technology is a new riff on shape-memory alloys, materials that can shrink or expand themselves and return to their original shape when stimulated by heat or electricity. Most shape-memory materials are metals, but Mnemo's plastic strips have a distinct medical advantage: they are biodegradable. A strip of Mnemo plastic threaded loosely around a hard-to-reach internal wound, for example, could shrink itself into a tight suture. In another application it could expand into scaffolding over which new tissue would grow in a bone cavity. Or it could expand into a stent, a device surgeons use to open blood vessels. And Mnemo co--managing director Dietmar Hellenbroich says surgeons could even tailor the material to degrade after two weeks or two years, depending on a patient's needs. While Mnemo, founded in 1998 by M.I.T. professor Robert Langer and scientist Andreas Lendlein, has not worked its product into the market yet, Hellenbroich is confident that Mnemo shape-memory plastics will be used inside people by 2005.

While Optobionics and MnemoScience are busy adding bits of technology to humans, others are trying to make our machines a bit more like ourselves. Alex Zelinsky, CEO of tiny Seeing Machines, based in Canberra, Australia, has been keeping his eye on road wrecks, which kill 1.26 million people worldwide every year, according to the World Health Organization. Working with Swedish carmaker Volvo, Seeing Machines is pairing small, driver-facing dashboard-mounted cameras with pattern-recognition software that analyzes whether the driver's face shows signs of fatigue, a top cause of traffic fatalities. "Our philosophy is that you cannot drive while you're fatigued. It's like driving drunk," says Zelinsky. If the system, called FaceLAB, spots a sleepy operator, an alarm of some sort goes off to rouse the driver. "Windows up and down, vibrating seats and God knows what," he explains. Volvo, which has invested in Seeing Machines, will deploy the technology "in the next few years,'' says Zelinsky, who expects other automakers to follow. He also foresees applications in trains, boats and planes as well as in the military as a way to keep drivers alert during advances, which can last days.

In Silver Spring, Md., the four-year-old research-and-development firm AnthroTronix is also using computer technology to promote well-being. One of the company's main interests is working with children afflicted with autism, Down syndrome and other disabilities. Children with these conditions have trouble communicating and coordinating basic bodily movements. So AnthroTronix has come up with a robot called CosmoBot, which can help parents and caregivers teach the kids how to move and interact with others.

Former biomedical-engineering professor Corinna Lathan founded AnthroTronix while on leave from her teaching position at Catholic University in Washington in 1999. "I kept thinking, This needs to be out there, and I can't believe it's not," says Lathan. "When I started working with kids, it was mind-boggling to me, the lack of technology available to them." CosmoBot can help a child by testing motor and verbal skills. The robot plays games like Simon Says and mimics a child's movements. For example, when the child pushes a button on the robot's central-command, or mission-control, box, the robot moves in that direction. The robot also comes with a video game in which a computerized CosmoBot must jump to catch falling stars--an action that requires the child to push buttons and direct the robot on screen.

Sometimes the biggest health advances can come in the form of tiny innovations. In Foster City, Calif., drug company Gilead has a very simple plan to tackle HIV: make the drugs easier to take. The firm gained headway two years ago when it introduced its Viread antiretroviral (HIV is a type of virus known as a retrovirus), which lasts longer than other similar medications and is more convenient for the user. In 2002 Gilead took in an incredible $226 million, almost half its annual revenue, from Viread.

Gilead's next step is to reduce the number of medications HIV patients are generally required to take from three to two. By combining its Viread tablet with another pill, Emtriva, made by Triangle Pharmaceuticals (which Gilead acquired in a $488 million deal last January), the company hopes to lessen the risk that a patient might forget to take a pill. HIV patients commonly stray from the strict three-tablet regimen, with deadly results. Once patients start missing pills, their bodies stop suppressing the virus, which may have fatal results. Viread and Emtriva have to be taken only once a day, compared with twice daily for some others. Cutting down the frequency of doses reduces the chances for a patient to miss one. Drug companies would like to develop a single pill, which has so far proved difficult.

In the drive toward the one-pill solution, Gilead and big pharmaceutical competitors might want to pay attention to a small company in Maidenhead, England, called Procognia Ltd. Procognia helps drug developers and life-science companies analyze proteins for their drug potential. The market last year for drugs built from proteins cloned and grown in a lab rather than from chemicals was $33 billion, according to Reuters Business Insight. Procognia also helps investigate the reasons some proteins cause disease.

The problem with proteins as a drug source is that they often carry erratic hitchhikers known as glycans. These unruly carbohydrates tend to step onto the protein in unpredictable ways that can dramatically affect how the protein will work as a drug. Procognia has developed a chip that deciphers this glycosylation as it happens. A lab technician can then adjust conditions to end up with just the right glycans to make a stable protein-based drug. Johanna Griffin, president of Procognia's U.S. division, near Philadelphia, says traditional methods of glycoanalysis, like mass spectrometry and high-pressure liquid chromatography, can take as long as six weeks--far too long for technicians to adjust their current batches of proteins. This chip analysis could also potentially serve as a cancer screener by detecting whether protein cells show glycans associated with any form of that disease. Ron Long, Procognia's chief executive, thinks the diagnostic market will eventually be Procognia's moneymaker, but for now the company is focusing its glycoanalysis technology on drugs. "The hardest thing you can do in marketing," he says, "is take a new technology to a new market." Like many of its fellow pioneers, Procognia has other products under development, including a handy kit of protein samples that would allow biomedical researchers to study many proteins at once. CK Life Sciences, the fertilizer company, is working on a yeast-based drug that would help fortify the immune systems of AIDS patients. If this group of health innovators wanted to band together under one tag line to describe themselves, they might want to borrow a slogan that Mnemo uses to promote its amazing expanding strips of plastic: they are "the shape of things to come." --With reporting by Neil Gough/Hong Kong, Lauren Shepherd/Silver Spring, Chris Taylor/San Francisco, David Thigpen/Chicago and Daniel Williams/Canberra

With reporting by Neil Gough/Hong Kong, Lauren Shepherd/Silver Spring, Chris Taylor/San Francisco, David Thigpen/Chicago and Daniel Williams/Canberra