Bob Langer at MIT is a recognized inventor with nearly 811 patents and with more than 25 companies started. He has come up with so many ideas and is so creative that it is amazing to compare him with Thomas Edison who had nearly ~1000 US patents. Interestingly, he has made some interesting on how the large size of a pharmaceutical company is an impediment for innovation. His comments in the Nov 2012 NY Times article are quoted below:
“Very often when you are going for real innovation,” he says, “you have to go against prevailing wisdom, and it’s hard to go against prevailing wisdom when there are people who have been there for a long time and you have some vice president who says, ‘No, that doesn’t make sense.’
This is sad since the pharmaceutical companies have the resources to innovate as well as come up with the practical applications of the innovation.
Consider the sustained drug release chip (the image is from one of Bob Langer’s patent applications) that he has been inventing and talking about since a long time. There have been so many objections to his innovative ideas on polymers as sustained drug release vehicles for cancer chemotherapy – Polymer-drug system would be toxic, the polymers will react with the drug, the chemotherapeutic agent will not diffuse far enough to be effective and many others. However, he has done a clinical trial to show that it is indeed possible and that is effective.
When innovative ideas are proposed, it takes a nurturing environment to grow it – a committee taking an average of everyone’s thoughts and powerful nay-sayer’s are sometimes enough to throttle it in its birth. To make pharmaceuticals into a creative force will require extremely small teams, probably run as independent Biotechs that are given only startup funds by pharmaceuticals. These companies would then be free to go to the market and experiment. If successful then they can be brought back to the pharmaceutical company fold as a externally vetted good idea that can now be grown and encouraged.