Europe's top innovation prize winners announced
The inventors of a ground-breaking AIDS treatment, lighter and more environmentally friendly aluminium car frames, a powerful but pain-free laser scanner for the eye, and a robot designed to overhaul medical surgery were presented with the European Inventor of the Year 2008 award. Four outstanding inventors from Belgium, Germany, United Kingdom and United States received Europe’s top innovation prize in Ljubljana today.
An international jury selected the winners in the following categories:
1. Industry - More environmentally friendly aluminium car frames
The search for more fuel-efficient cars ultimately led to lighter frames built with new materials. Overcoming the old paradigm in car engineering that steel is the ultimate material of choice, Audi’s team of inventors around Norbert Enning paved the way for the use of aluminium as a next-generation fabric which renders car frames not only lighter and slimmer, but also safer.
There are several ways to make automobiles more fuel-efficient; new power sources are one option, as are changes in transmission systems. But at the most basic level, the lighter a car the less gasoline it will use. This is where the aluminium car frame system developed by Enning and his team enters the picture.
Aluminium has been around for decades, but car manufacturers had shunned it in favour of steel in frame designs on the premise that “the heavier, the stronger.” Many designers doubted that aluminium was resilient enough to perform under pressure. Merely substituting steel with aluminium was not an option. Without major design changes, aluminium would have bent at critical weight distribution points. To optimise the distribution of weight, Norbert Enning and his team had to completely re-think the concept of automotive frame design.
In 1993, Audi patented the aluminium car frame system, including respective methods of mass production. One year later, the automotive company introduced the world’s first-ever mass-produced car with an all-aluminium body — the Audi A8. Since then, the frame system has been marketed as the Audi Space Frame (ASF) with major success and continuous improvements.
Direct benefits of the technology include better fuel efficiency, increased road handling, better cornering characteristics and ease of repair. Tests have proven that the frame’s high rigidity also offers better crash protection than steel frames. In terms of durability, aluminium is the only corrosion-free material on the market. With a high degree of pliability, aluminium also offers designers more possibilities for shaping new, more efficient parts.
Since Audi opened up the possibilities of aluminium as car body material, other manufacturers have followed suit.
How it works
Enning's invention is best described as a self-supporting frame in which all components such as castings, profiles and panels are part of an integrated weight-bearing system. As each part “carries the other”, the frame achieves maximum stability at minimum mass. Each component fulfils a number of functions, such as supporting other parts or serving as part of numerous cross-sections. As they were designing this intricate system, Enning’s team members realised that the multi-tasking approach required fewer parts — more than 17 percent less — than prior frame designs.
2. Lifetime Achievement - Ground-breaking AIDS treatment
Until recently, physicians had extremely limited options available when treating viral infections. Viruses’ ability to mutate and the difficulty of selectively targeting them left physicians to treat symptoms instead of attacking the infectious agents themselves. Today, clinicians have effective weapons in their arsenal thanks largely to four decades of virological research by Professor Erik De Clercq of the University of Leuven, Belgium.
De Clercq’s landmark contributions to biomedical sciences include the development of new antiviral agents for the treatment of viral infections ranging from different forms of herpes to hepatitis B and HIV. In fact, De Clercq and his team are single-handedly responsible for developing some of the original drugs against HIV. They also inspired a switch from monotherapy (treatment with one kind of drug) to the use of up to four agents at a time — the “drug cocktail” that is now the standard treatment approach for HIV. He is best known for opening up the field of so-called “nucleotide analogues”, which spawned the first-ever series of broad-spectrum antiviral drugs.
The implications of his findings can hardly be overstated. As our understanding of viruses has grown over the past decades, researchers have found that direct complications from viral infections are only half the story. Viruses can cause cancers and other complications. For example, the polyomavirus has been proven to cause tumours, and a direct link between the papilloma virus and cervical cancer has been established. These links make potent antiviral drugs even more important.
De Clerq has always displayed a strong passion for research, making the laboratory his second home since he began his medical career in 1966. Since 1972, he has led the Laboratory for Virology at Leuven University’s Rega Institute for Medical Research. De Clercq has published over 2100 papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals and has given more than 530 lectures at international congresses, conferences and symposia on various aspects of antiviral chemotherapy. An active member of countless boards and advisory committees, including the World Health Organization (WHO) Expert Advisory Panel on Virus Diseases, De Clercq is addressing the pressing issues of our times, including the threat of an H5N1 “avian flu” pandemic.
How it works
De Clercq’s new breed of drugs prevents retroviruses from taking over their host cells and turning them into factories that produce millions more viruses — viruses that go on to infect other cells and, eventually, overwhelm the body’s defences. De Clercq’ “nucleotide analogues” achieve this by mimicking the shape and contours of the four building blocks of DNA, the replicating blueprint from which viruses spawn countless copies of themselves after “re-programming” their host cells. Since the virus “believes” the drug to be a building block from which it can make DNA, it incorporates the drug into a growing DNA strand. Once incorporated, the drug then blocks the reproduction process of the virus.
3. Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) and Research – A powerful but pain-free laser scanner for the eye
In the early 1990s, a team of Scottish inventors developed a system that yields a complete and detailed picture of a patient’s retina in a quarter of a second via a non-invasive laser scanning technology, making stressful eye exams a thing of the past.
In the early 1990s, the young son of Douglas Anderson was undergoing regular eye exams. They were uncomfortable, especially for such a young child, and yielded at best incomplete results.
In 1992 Douglas’ son, then 5 years old, went blind in one eye when a retinal detachment was detected too late. Anderson devoted himself to finding a child-friendly method of conducting an examination of the retina that would yield complete and thorough images without the need for dilation.
After some years of testing within Crombie Anderson, a British product design consultancy, Anderson, together with Robert Henderson, an optical engineer who then worked as an external consultant, and Roger Lucas, patented the first scanning laser ophthalmoscope able to scan a very wide field of the retina. That same year Douglas founded Optos, a spin-off of Crombie Anderson, a company headquartered in Dunfermline, Scotland, that by the time of its initial public offering on the London Stock Exchange in February 2006 had revolutionised the way eye exams are conducted. It raised some $54 million in equity the day it went public.
While Optos began operations in the United Kingdom and the United States, it has since expanded distribution to Canada and continental Europe, operating now in France, Germany, Norway, Spain and Switzerland.
Optos generated $86.8 million in revenue for the year ended 30 September 2007, representing growth of 28 percent over the previous year.
How it works
The Optos scanning laser ophthalmoscope is a proprietary medical device that generates a complete retinal exam. Unlike conventional ways of looking at the retina, the device uses a very low-level laser beam to provide a high-resolution ultra-wide-field digital image that captures approximately 82 percent of the retina in a single scan.
The scanning laser system combines two low-powered lasers into a single beam that is then projected onto the patient’s retina and manipulated through a 200-degree scan angle. Light reflected from the retina is then returned through the scanning system and converted into electrical impulses by highly sensitive photo diodes. These impulses are in turn digitised and formatted to create a digital image that can be stored and later compared to other images. The retinal exam can be completed in a quarter of a second and does not require pupil dilation, whereas conventional retinal imaging methods take longer and are more invasive and less patient-friendly.
4. Non-European Inventors - Robot designed to overhaul medical surgery
It’s a rare individual who makes two lasting and commercially viable contributions to a single field — rarer still that such a person can make the claim to have bettered the lives of millions in the process. Biomedical engineer Philip S. Green of SRI International, the non-profit research institute formerly known as the Stanford Research Institute of Stanford University, is one such man.
Beginning in the late 1960s, Green spearheaded more than two dozen inventions that made ultrasound a usable medical diagnostic tool. In the 1980s he began development of what is now becoming the world’s most-used and most-trusted system for minimally invasive surgery.
Green integrated advances in miniature cameras, stereo imaging displays, robotics and remote control systems to create a prototype that gave surgeons the visual and tactile sensations of being inside the patient — even though the surgery would be performed by robot arms through tiny holes.
Seeing it as way of allowing surgeons at remote hospitals to treat casualties before they bled to death on the field of battle, the US Army authorised significant funding for what was by then known as the Green Telepresence System. The team began their clinical testing in Belgium and quickly proved that Green’s telepresence system gave surgeons not only superior control over their instruments, but a unique view inside the body through a magnified three-dimensional video image of the operating field.
Initially dubbed Mona (after da Vinci’s Mona Lisa), the system was re-christened the da Vinci Surgical Robot in 1999 in honour of the man who had invented the first robot. In 2000 it became the first robotic surgical system to be cleared by the US Food and Drug Administration for general laparoscopic surgery, and has subsequently been authorised for use in cardiac, chest, urological and gynaecological procedures.
How it works
The da Vinci robotic surgery system allows surgeons to perform complex procedures such as cardiac surgery through incisions as small as 1-2 centimetres. It deploys four robot arms, each of which carries a microtool: one for manipulating, one for cutting, another for cauterising and a fourth for suturing. A movable cart next to the operating table holds the arms, while the surgeon sits at a sophisticated, ergonomically designed control console with a magnified three-dimensional view of the operating field.
The da Vinci’s processors and software turn the surgeon’s hand movements into extremely precise gestures of the microtools, each of which carries a stabilised camera to ensure the surgeon has a perfect and unwavering view of what is happening inside the patient’s body. Each of the microtools carries its own microprocessor chip to help translate the system’s interpretation of the surgeon’s highly precise commands into cuts and sutures that are more steady and accurate than any human hand could make using a standard scalpel and magnified vision. The system also deploys patented motion-scaling and tremor-reduction systems.
This year's award ceremony was held in Ljubljana alongside the European Patent Forum 2008 "Inventing a cleaner future". This EPO conference provides a platform for internationally renowned experts to discuss the potential role of the intellectual property system in combating climate change. For more information, please go to: http://www.epo.org/about-us/events/epf2008/forum.html
Memo: Short profile of the winners and their inventions
Audiovisual text and pictures can be downloaded here:
http://www.epo.org/topics/news/2008/20080410.html
Published on: 2008-05-06
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