Perspectives on Innovation

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.

Earlier this week we announced that Prize4Life had awarded 2 InnoCentive Solvers for their efforts toward finding a biomarker for ALS.  Prize4Life also announced that they would be reposting the Challenge in May, in honor of the organization’s third anniversary.  I asked Melanie Leitner, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer from Prize4Life to talk to us about this Challenge, the submissions they received and their hopes for relaunching the Challenge.

Thanks for talking with us today, Melanie.  Can you tell us why you decided to post this Challenge on InnoCentive’s Marketplace?  How optimistic were you that you would find a solution?

When we first developed the Biomarker Prize in 2006, we wanted a way to draw in a broad, diverse, and international pool of competing teams.  As a brand new, very small organization just establishing itself, we did not have the capacity to conduct the kind of marketing and outreach campaign necessary to reach the audience we were looking to attract. We were looking for a partner with established expertise and existing international networks in the open innovation domain. InnoCentive was an attractive partner for us, particularly given their large pool of international solvers.  We also saw that InnoCentive shared many of Prize4Life goals and values, including wanting to change the world (but being agnostic as to where these new world-changing solutions might come from) and especially being international in focus. We knew that posting a $1 million prize, the largest prize ever posted on InnoCentive, would benefit the great work that both organizations were doing.

When our Scientific Advisory Board first set a 2-year deadline for this prize, we knew it was very ambitious.  After all, it often takes 2 years just to get an NIH grant, and in the same period of time, we were asking researchers to come up with a novel idea, find funding, conduct a patient-based study (with all the regulatory hurdles that entails), and provide us with validated results.  Still, we needed to balance these realities with the realities of ALS: most patients die within 2-5 years of diagnosis, and there is currently only one FDA-approved ALS drug on the market, so the need for an ALS biomarker of disease progression was urgent. We knew we were setting a very high bar, but we also knew that if we handled this prize well, we could accelerate research on a very targeted issue.  Our Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) believed that even though we were setting a very high bar, there was a reasonable likelihood that it could be met in 2 years and given the urgency of the need it was worth taking the risk.

Your Challenge was to find a biomarker for ALS – why did you decide to pay an award if the Challenge hasn’t been solved?

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