To Your Health

DAVID ROSE FOR TIME
RON LONG, CEO, Precognia: The company's protein-analysis capability helps firms make more precisely targeted drugs

World Economic Forum
Pioneers think big. It wasn't small-mindedness that led Lewis and Clark to conquer the Rocky Mountains, or Gordon Moore to predict the exponential growth of computing power. Name a challenge today, and chances are you will find a company with world-altering answers. Want proof? Meet some of the 2004 Tech Pioneers this year's crop of 30 cutting-edge amazers, which will be announced this week by the World Economic Forum, prior to its annual meeting in Davos. They are working to combat AIDS, cancer, blindness and hunger. They're developing software that can keep track of anyone or anything, and new sources of power to wean the world from oil. Wish them luck.

On the rural outskirts of Hong Kong lies a site that was once a car-repair shop. Today it houses an experimental farm run by CK Life Sciences International. CK's chief technology officer, S.F. Pang, ambles around the lush, green grounds, extolling the virtues of one of the company's most successful products, NutriSmart fertilizer. NutriSmart is superefficient a dose one-third the size of conventional chemical fertilizers provides the same crop yield and because it's organic, it doesn't harm the environment. But most important, Pang insists, NutriSmart makes produce taste better. "Absolutely delicious," he purrs as he savors a handful of cherry tomatoes.

CK Life Sciences is part of a crop of this year's World Economic Forum Technology Pioneers, whose innovations are making the world a healthier place by tackling malnutrition, combating diseases like AIDS and cancer and preventing the leading mechanized cause of death, car crashes. Some of these pioneering firms like Optobionics, a company based in Naperville, Ill., that is perfecting a microchip to help the blind see have a decidedly cyborg bent. Others use advanced computer technology to stimulate humans into action, like the dashboard equipment from Seeing Machines that detects when drivers become drowsy and then jolts them awake. And companies like Gilead and Procognia are helping to find new drugs to stop the world's killer diseases. But what unites all these companies is the common desire to use the latest scientific and technological advances to improve our quality of life.

In 1990, when Alan Chow, founder of Optobionics, began developing the artificial retina that could help some blind people regain sight, bionic technology was mostly considered fantasy. "When we started, what we proposed was such a radically different approach to incurable eye disease that the idea was considered science fiction," says Chow, 50. But with 10 trial operations since 2000, Chow and Optobionics are inching closer to the regulatory nod that would usher their bionic device into the mainstream medical world.

Thirty million to 40 million people around the world suffer from retinitis pigmentosa or macular degeneration, two diseases in which the retina a thin sheet of cells in the back of the eye slowly loses its ability to convert light into the electrochemical signals that are transmitted to the visual centers of the brain. As the diseases progress, sufferers gradually lose more and more of their sight. First the peripheral vision goes, then light sensitivity narrows until one day their window on the world snaps completely shut. Once surgically placed in the eye, Chow's Artificial Silicon Retina (ASR)--a computer chip about the size of a pinhead takes on the job of the retina's damaged photoreceptors. The ASR restores only functional not total vision and works just on patients with retinitis pigmentosa or macular degeneration, so it's not a cure for blindness. Nevertheless, Chow says, the 10 trial patients all have shown "moderate to substantial" improvement, and "one patient who had been able to see only shadows for years could make out the faces of his family." Chow, who co-founded his company six years ago with his brother Vincent, believes he's still five to 10 years away from making his bionic eye procedure generally available. First he has to win full regulatory approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. He also has to bring costs well below their current level, nearly $2 million per operation.

An equally breathtaking effort to use technology to supplement the body comes from MnemoScience of Aachen, Germany. The company is developing a thin strip of plastic that, once delivered into the body, can wrap and twist itself into just the right shape to help mend bones, open blood vessels and close wounds. Mnemo's technology is a new riff on shape-memory alloys, materials that can shrink or expand themselves and return to their original shape when stimulated by heat or electricity. Most shape-memory materials are metals, but Mnemo's plastic strips have a distinct medical advantage: they are biodegradable. A strip of Mnemo plastic threaded loosely around a hard-to-reach internal wound, for example, could shrink itself into a tight suture. In another application it could expand into scaffolding over which new tissue would grow in a bone cavity. Or it could expand into a stent, a device surgeons use to open blood vessels. And Mnemo co managing director Dietmar Hellenbroich says surgeons could even tailor the material to degrade after two weeks or two years, depending on a patient's needs. While Mnemo, founded in 1998 by M.I.T. professor Robert Langer and scientist Andreas Lendlein, has not worked its product into the market yet, Hellenbroich is confident that Mnemo shape-memory plastics will be used inside people by 2005.