Perspectives on Innovation

We’re very proud to announce that our customer, Prize4Life, was recognized today as the winner in the Life Sciences category for the 2011 Spike Awards.

According to the sponsor of the awards, Kalypso, the “Spike Awards recognize the best use of social strategies, processes, and supporting technologies to improve innovation, product development, and product management…The Awards celebrate forward-thinking innovators that leverage Social Product Innovation across the product lifecycle, including open innovation, crowdsourcing, expert identification, collaboration platforms, social product development and sentiment analysis.”

Our customer, Prize4Life, is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the discovery of treatments and cures for ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. The organization was founded by Avi Kremer, a Harvard Business School student diagnosed with ALS at the age of twenty-nine. In 2006, Prize4Life partnered with InnoCentive to launch the $1 million ALS Biomarker Prize. This Grand Challenge focused on finding a biomarker to measure the progression of ALS in patients, thereby facilitating the cost effective development of treatments by pharmaceutical and biotech companies.

The multi-stage Grand Challenge was launched via InnoCentive.com in 2006 and made available to InnoCentive’s Global Solver Community (which today is a quarter-million strong and growing). In 2007, as part of the first two stages of the Challenge, Prize4Life awarded several ‘thought’ prizes to encourage promising concepts. Of particular note, a dermatologist with no prior ALS experience was recognized and rewarded for applying a skin-elasticity method used in the cosmetic industry. This is a prime example of the importance of diversity in solving problem (and in fact, two-thirds of the teams competing for the prize came from outside the traditional ALS field). In total, partial awards totaling $175,000 went to six groups. In 2009, the third stage of the $1 million Grand Challenge was posted to InnoCentive’s Global Solver Community. Two years later (early 2011), the full $1 million amount was awarded to Dr. Seward Rutkove, a neurologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, for his biomarker discovery.

Dr. Rutkove developed a non-invasive test that measures the flow of a small electrical current through muscle tissue. Electrical current travels differently through healthy and diseased tissue, and by comparing the size and speed of the current, Dr. Rutkove’s method can accurately measure the progression of ALS. While the Grand Challenge process culminated in the identification of a biomarker, the five-year multi-stage Challenge process inspired many new ideas from new thinkers, some of whom had no prior ALS experience. These ideas may yield future promise both inside and outside the field of ALS. In fact, KineMed, a biotech company that was awarded one of the thought prizes, proposed a biomarker that has potential utility in Parkinson’s disease research. Prize4Life connected the company to the Michael J. Fox Foundation, and they are currently working together to develop the technology. In total, nearly 3,000 Solvers and over 100 solutions from dozens of countries were proposed over the course of the Prize4Life Grand Challenge.

“Participating in the challenge helped to refine my thinking,” said Dr. Rutkove. “It led me to apply my technology research specifically to ALS focusing on both the animal studies and device development. In our case, participation has effectively sped the development of a handheld device to sensitively measure disease progression.”

A wonderful story, and some well-deserved recognition for Prize4Life. Congratulations!

(If you’re interested in learning more about Grand Challenges, register to download our latest white paper, “Solving The World’s Toughest Challenges in Grand Fashion.”)

Today’s guest post is courtesy of Nate Hinchey, Communications Manager for Prize4Life.

In 16 years with the New York Yankees, Lou Gehrig played in 2,164 games. From 1925 to 1939, he played in 2,130 consecutive games. He played sick, and he played hurt. He played through slumps and stardom. Whenever Gehrig’s number was called, he stepped up to the plate. You aren’t born with a nickname like ‘The Iron Horse;’ you have to earn it. For 14 years, there was no force on heaven or earth that could keep Henry Louis Gehrig from playing baseball.

And then, on May 2^nd, 1939, after months of steadily declining performance, Lou benched himself and ended his streak. In June of that year, he received the diagnosis: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. ALS. Lou Gehrig’s disease. He would never play again.

More than 70 years later, there is still no cure for ALS.  That’s why Prize4Life was founded. Our CEO was diagnosed with the disease in 2004 at the age of 27. He knew that existing resources and research were not enough—something was needed to bring new minds and new money into the fight. Our model fills that need. Prize4Life offers large, cash prizes for targeted scientific breakthroughs that will help accelerate the search for a cure. (more…)

In a recent conversation with Melanie Leitner, Chief Scientific Officer of Prize4Life, she mentioned a great new resource that the organization had developed for Solvers – the ALS Forum.  This Forum contains an unbelievable amount of reference information about ALS drug development, links to potential funding sources, networking resources, the latest news on ALS research and more.  In the near future, Prize4Life will add including new databases and demonstration videos.  The Forum was developed in part as a result of suggestions and feedback from InnoCentive Solvers and is an absolutely essential resource for anyone working on the Prize4Life Challenge, or in any area of ALS research.  Check it out!

We recently announced that Prize4Life had awarded two Solvers for their progress toward finding a biomarker for ALS. Seward Rutkove, MD, an ALS researcher and clinician who has worked in the ALS field for more than 10 years, received a Progress Prize for his proposed biomarker based on the observation that electrical current flows differently through healthy vs. diseased muscle tissue and these changes in current flow can be sensitively measured. His team is developing handheld technologies capable of taking these highly sensitive measurements to determine how changes in current flow correlate with disease progression in ALS patients.

I am a neurologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, having graduated from Cornell University and Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. I completed my neurology training at the Harvard-Longwood Neurology Program and fellowship in clinical neurophysiology and neuromuscular disease at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston.

Since 1995, I have focused my career on taking care of people with neuromuscular disorders. This includes people with relatively mild problems such as carpal tunnel syndrome, to people with more severe diseases, such as muscular dystrophy and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Early on, I learned of the limitations of current diagnostic modalities for these conditions and became determined to improve upon them. For this reason, initially through collaboration with physicists at Northeastern University and more recently, with help from engineers at MIT, I have worked to develop and refine the technique of electrical impedance myography (EIM).  This technique offers the possibility of evaluating muscle painlessly and non-invasively. The research on EIM has been funded through multiple sources including the National Institutes of Health, the Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Association, and the Spinal Muscular Atrophy Foundation. I was already in the process of collecting data on ALS patients when I learned of the ALS Biomarker Challenge through InnoCentive. This Challenge helped push me to improve upon our methods of data collection and to make our first handheld prototype device a reality (see http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/22415/).

I continue to explore and refine EIM techniques and their interpretation in the hope that they may one day be applied widely to help evaluate and treat anyone with a nerve or muscle disorder.

Harvey Arbesman, a Solver from Buffalo, New York, recently won the Discovery Prize for the InnoCentive Prize4Life ALS Biomarker Challenge.

I am a board-certified dermatologist in private practice in a suburb of Buffalo. I graduated from the University at Buffalo School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences and did my dermatology residency at University Hospitals in Cleveland, Ohio. In addition to dermatology, I have always been interested in public health and epidemiology. So, while continuing to see patients in my private dermatology practice, I decided to go back to school and obtained my Masters of Science in Epidemiology from the University at Buffalo School of Public Health and Health-Related Professions.

I really enjoy looking at different problems from new angles with “out of the box” thinking and seeking out clues from epidemiology and old medical textbooks and journals. I try to think of new ways to prevent, diagnose or treat different medical problems. To assist me in this goal, I also earned a certificate in Facilitating Creative Problem Solving from the International Center for Studies in Creativity (where the term “brainstorming” was coined).

In 2002, my wife Marian and I founded ArbesIdeas, Inc., a research and development company devoted to innovation in health-related issues. I am currently the Vice President. I love learning about new and innovative approaches to health-related issues and combine my medical background with a passion for new ideas to develop new medical hypotheses and innovative health-related products.

I have published in various medical journals including the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology and Medical Hypotheses. I am currently a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Dermatology in the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences where I teach dermatology residents about clinical epidemiology and hypothesis generation. I am also a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine in the School of Public Health and Health Professions at the University at Buffalo.

I have participated in different InnoCentive Challenges dealing with various areas of medicine, including ALS, Muscular Dystrophy and Tuberculosis.

Find out more about Harvey and ArbesIdeas at www.arbesideas.com/
Find out more about the Prize4Life ALS Biomarker Challenge.