2008 Innovation in Industry Awards

Winners of the 2008 Innovation and Industry Awards were announced at the New York Academy of Sciences' fifth annual Science & The City Gala on November 17. They were selected by an external panel of judges including scientific leaders from a broad range of disciplines.

Winners

Drs. John Mikszta and Vince Sullivan

Becton Dickinson
for the development of microneedle and inhalable vaccine delivery technology for influenza and anthrax.

Over the past decade, John Mikszta and Vince Sullivan have been leaders in vaccine delivery, with a particular focus on childhood immunizations for the developing world, biodefense vaccines, and influenza vaccinations in the elderly. The effort has involved translational research from preclinical through human clinical trials and the transition of this research into commercial development. Their research has led to partnerships between industry, the federal government, and private philanthropic organizations to improve public health on a global front.

One particularly innovative aspect of the research is the development of technology to stabilize vaccines in dry powder form. This approach has the potential to dramatically increase vaccine availability in the developing world by reducing or eliminating the need for "cold chain" refrigeration of liquid vaccines, which is often not possible in poor countries. In addition, their research has produced novel vaccine delivery technologies, such as microneedles for delivery to the immune-rich skin and needle-free devices for respiratory administration of vaccines to the nasal and pulmonary systems.

These technologies hold great potential to facilitate mass vaccination in industrialized nations as well as the developing world and to increase vaccine potency in certain populations. The research has resulted in numerous peer-reviewed scientific publications in prestigious medical journals including Nature Medicine, The Journal of Infectious Diseases, the Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences, and others. Overall, the research effort illustrates broad collaboration across private and public health sectors resulting in highly innovative new products with the potential to dramatically benefit global public health.

Dr. Menelas Pangalos

Wyeth
for the development of novel, innovative strategies for developing viable therapeutic agents for neurological disorders.

Menelas Pangalos has made significant contributions to the field of neuroscience research. He has focused on designing novel, innovative strategies for developing viable therapeutic agents. His work has the potential to benefit both future research and patients in need of new medicines.

Dr. Pangalos has an intense passion for high-quality basic research. His recent significant work includes:

• demonstrating a completely novel approach to clearing toxic ß-amyloid by sustaining the plasmin proteolysis cascade (PNAS 2008)
• elucidating the transgenic mouse model of Alzheimer's disease by demonstrating that neurodegeneration is age-dependent and precedes the formation of ß-amyloid plaques, a finding validated by others highlighting the role of soluble amyloid-ß in Alzheimer's disease (J. Neuroscience 2005, PNAS 2006)
• highlighting the importance of estrogen receptor subtypes in modulating the cognitive and synaptogenic effects of estrogen (Nature Neuroscience 2008).

Each of these works has generated broad interest within the scientific community and is the foundation for potential therapeutic approaches.

Since his arrival at Wyeth, Dr. Pangalos has driven a tripling of the number of compounds in development within the neuroscience group. Wyeth now has more than 10 compounds in development for the treatment of AD, and the company is pursuing novel therapies for stroke, multiple sclerosis, and Parkinson's disease, among others. In a testament to his contributions, R&D Directions chose this CNS pipeline as being industry-leading.

Finalists

Dr. Hendrik F. Haman

IBM
for innovations in measuring real-time temperature and power distributions in operational microprocessors and large data centers.

Hendrik Hamann's current research addresses the exploding energy usage of IT technology. Specifically, he has developed a holistic understanding of thermal and energy management throughout the IT stack, ranging from exploring sub-diffusion heat conduction effects in nanoscale silicon devices, to characterizing power density distributions of high-performance microprocessors, to developing new thermal modeling concepts of entire data centers.

In 2006 he devised a novel technique which first made it possible to measure real-time temperature and power distributions of a fully operational microprocessor (Spatially-resolved imaging of microprocessor power [SIMP]). SIMP results were vital for optimizing chip package solutions, designing more temperature- and energy-efficient circuit layouts, and developing a complete temperature-aware, Linux-based workload scheduler. The work also led to a series of contributions in the field of chip-scale thermal modeling, including an understanding of minimum power granularities and the development of new numerical methods for calculating chip temperature profile, based on spatial frequency domain analysis of heat transfer.

Dr. Hamann is also the inventor of Mobile Measurement Technology (MMT) for optimizing space and energy efficiency of large-scale buildings such as data centers. The technology uses an advanced metrology technique for rapid data collection at high spatial density and measurement-driven modeling techniques, enabling optimal adjustments of the environment within a target thermal envelope. The MMT is today a worldwide IBM Offering and has been deployed in over 30 data centers, demonstrating repeated, average energy efficiency improvements of more than 10%.

Drs. Jochen Kruecker, Sheng Xu, and Pingkun Yan

Philips Research North America
for breakthrough technologies to overcome image guidance limitations for prostate cancer diagnosis and therapy.

Due to a lack of visualization of prostate cancer in ultrasound imaging, prostate biopsies are currently performed by "blindly" sampling the prostate with 12 individual biopsy cores instead of targeting suspicious lesions. Lack of realtime PCA imaging also limits currently available therapies to whole-gland approaches with significant side effects. Other diagnostic imaging modalities, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), have shown great potential to accurately depict prostate cancer, but interventional use of MRI scanners is expensive and impractical for guidance of high-volume procedures.

The team developed and validated image fusion technologies to bring target information from pre-acquired MRI into realtime ultrasound-guided procedures. This has enabled less invasive targeted biopsies and focal therapies with significantly reduced side effects. Realtime image fusion is challenging due to the freehand nature of ultrasound and the mobility of the organ. The team overcame these problems by using electromagnetic spatial tracking of the ultrasound probe to create a 3D ultrasound baseline image of the prostate. The baseline image is semi-automatically registered with the MRI. Subsequent 2D ultrasound frames are registered in near-realtime with the baseline image using a novel image registration approach, thus maintaining US/MRI registration in the presence of prostate motion.

The technology was developed and evaluated in laboratory experiments, verified in preclinical studies, and brought to clinical trial at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center. Significantly higher positive biopsy rates were obtained in US/MRI-targeted biopsies compared to conventional biopsies.