InnoCentive, as many readers surely know, is a clearinghouse between those with scientific problems to solve (i.e., challenges), and those who might provide solutions. And often the proffered solutions come from fields outside the domain where the question is being asked.
I discuss this process of unearthing ideas and connecting them between different fields in my book The Half-Life of Facts. And one of the prime examples I discuss is that of my father, Harvey Arbesman, who posited a biomarker for ALS by combining ideas from dermatology and neurodegenerative disease.
Well, my father has done it again! He recently became one of the five winners for an InnoCentive competition related to polio. We conducted a little email Q&A.
Samuel Arbesman: First of all, what was the InnoCentive challenge and what was your proposed solution?
Harvey Arbesman: This Challenge by BeyondPolio sought to identify promising and overlooked approaches to significantly reduce the cost and facilitate the use of the inactivated poliovirus vaccine in low- and middle-income countries. One of the problems with the low cost oral poliovirus vaccine which is currently being used in these countries is that it contains weakened live viruses that can mutate back to a virulent form. This can then lead to a reintroduction of potentially paralyzing polioviruses in the areas where it is used, The injected, inactivated poliovirus vaccine, which is used in wealthier countries, does not have this problem since it contains only dead viruses. Unfortunately, it is presently too expensive for widespread use in low- and middle-income countries. Hence the need for this challenge.
My solution proposed using what's called a transcutaneous adjuvant patch. This patch topically applies immune-stimulating chemicals to the skin. These chemicals then pass through the skin and boost the patient's overall immune response to the injected dead poliovirus. The patch can easily be applied to the skin right over the site where the vaccine had been injected. A similar type of patch has been used in combination with the influenza vaccine in the elderly and was effective in boosting their immune response. With this increase of the individual's immune response by use of these patches, we can potentially use 80% less of the poliovirus antigen, thus significantly decreasing the total cost of the poliovirus vaccine while maintaining or even increasing its effectiveness.
Samuel Arbesman: You’re trained as a dermatologist, not someone who might be expected to provide insight into global infectious disease. As a dermatologist, how did you go about finding knowledge that was of use to helping eliminate polio?
Harvey Arbesman: One could say that the major advantage of not being an expert in vaccines is that I did not know what the vaccine research community would consider "impossible or foolish." Thus, I could look at the problem from a totally different perspective. InnoCentive utilizes this concept of crowdsourcing to encourage individuals to contribute to fields that normally would be considered outside their area of expertise. This "out of the box thinking" Open Innovation approach offers great promise for solving many important problems facing the world.
I tried to look at what had been done previously to solve this vaccine problem and then looked for various angles related to the skin, vaccines and immunity in general. Once I found out more about these patches, I thought this idea had great promise for a solution to this challenge. For some reason, an adjuvant patch has not been reported to have been used in combination with the poliovirus vaccine and thus could be considered an "overlooked" opportunity.
Samuel Arbesman: What is “undiscovered public knowledge” and what are the tools you use to discover such knowledge in this age of exponentially growing scientific information?
Harvey Arbesman: Undiscovered public knowledge is when various pieces of scientific information are already present in the literature but have not been combined in such a manner to solve a completely different problem.
One tool that is very helpful and exciting to use for the biomedical space is Arrowsmith. This free, online tool allows one to search the National Library of Medicine (PubMed) and identify previously unrecognized connections between two topics that currently are not considered related by a normal PubMed search. Arrowsmith finds various new terms and facts that are related to both topic's search term and thus may be a previously undiscovered bridge to find new relationships between those previously unrelated search terms.
Samuel Arbesman: Who do you think is the ideal InnoCentive solver?
**Harvey Arbesman: I think one should be an individual who is passionately curious and very willing to learn about things outside their main domain of expertise, though still tangentially related. For example, I tend to focus on various biomedical challenges but not necessarily explicitly dermatology related ones. Of course, the ideal InnoCentive Solver should also be ready to reflect on how that newly acquired knowledge is related to their field of expertise and how any connection may help lead to a potential solution. Also, the solver has to recognize that the idea for a solution won't come immediately or even fairly quickly; there needs to be an incubation period, where one reads and learns a lot about different factors related to the challenge to gain key background information and then just let it sit and incubate.
Samuel Arbesman: What project are you working on next?
Harvey Arbesman: Besides being a dermatologist, I'm also an epidemiologist. I am currently exploring different risk factors that may be related to increasing one's risk of developing melanoma. Though sun exposure certainly plays a role, we need to try to understand other etiologic factors that may be contributing to the ongoing epidemic of melanoma throughout the world.
