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Europe's Top Innovation Prize Winners Announced MEMO/09/207 Brussels, 28 April 2009 Europe's top innovation prize winners announced Health and the environment were the big winners when the European Commission and the European Patent Office presented the 2009 European Inventor of the Year awards. In the presence of Czech President Václav Klaus and over 400 guests in Prague Castle, European Patent Office (EPO) President Alison Brimelow and EU Commissioner Vladimír Špidla today honoured inventors in four different categories: An international jury selected the winners in the following four categories: 1. Lifetime Achievement – Adolf Goetzberger (Germany) Commercial use of solar energy and helping to make solar cells a viable alternative to fossil fuels Every hour the sun generates enough energy to meet the world’s entire annual demand. However, it is one of our planet’s most under-utilised sources of energy despite being one of the few combining the benefits of zero-pollution, renewability and easy access. Solar energy remains a growing field of research and innovation with largely untapped potential, holding out the promise of a greener and more sustainable future. If solar energy is thriving in various sectors today, it is in no small part thanks to the efforts of Adolf Goetzberger, founder of the Fraunhofer-Institut for Solar Energy (ISE), the largest European research institute dedicated to solar power. Since beginning his research in solar energy as a young scientist in the 1960s, Goetzberger has firmly believed in the capability of the sun to be an energy source “for the people”, arguing that photovoltaic power generation has the potential to become a real and affordable alternative to fossil fuels. Before he founded ISE, Goetzberger had already established a name for himself working in semiconductor research. It was on 1 July 1981 that Goetzberger realised his dream. Taking a bold step into uncharted territory, he founded the ISE with a team of 18 employees. Only Goetzberger’s good name and lots of negotiating convinced Fraunhofer officials to grant money for such an “exotic” plan – the research of solar energy. With Goetzberger at the helm, ISE constructed the first fully electronic inverter for stand- alone photovoltaic systems. The institute also took one of the first steps towards developing highly efficient silicon and III-V solar cells, thin film solar cells and solar- grade silicon. These days, work at the ISE ranges from the investigation of scientific and technological fundamentals for solar energy applications and the development of production technology and prototypes to the construction of solar energy-related demonstration systems. Goetzberger has also cooperated in the research and development of Concentrating Solar Power (CSP), which could satisfy all of Europe’s electricity needs by 2050, as a study sponsored by the German government found. 2. Industry - Brian Druker (USA) and Jürg Zimmermann (Switzerland) Effective drug to combat chronic myelogenous leukaemia, providing unprecedented rates of recovery Chronic myelogenous leukaemia (CML) was long-considered one of the deadliest forms of cancer, capable of striking at any time, causing extreme pain and worse still, affecting both adults and young children. Before the work of two pioneering medical researchers, a diagnosis of CML and subsequent attempts at treatment guaranteed prolonged pain and no certainty of remission. But now with Glivec, a cancer fighting drug with a 98 percent remission rate, CML has lost much of its former bite thanks to American oncologist Brian Druker and Swiss medicinal chemist Jürg Zimmermann. In 1960, researchers identified an abnormally short chromosome in 95% of patients with CML, which they named the Philadelphia chromosome. Understanding the phenomenon of the Philadelphia chromosome was seen as the key to curing CML. After another 13 years of research, it was discovered that the Philadelphia chromosome is the result of two chromosomes swapping DNA. By the early 1980s, researchers demonstrated that the DNA swap resulted in a fusion protein (the product of two genes or proteins joining together) called BCR-ABL. BCR-ABL causes the overproduction of white blood cells in the body. Where healthy blood contains 4,000 to 10,000 white cells per cubic millimetre, blood from a CML patient contains 10 to 25 times this amount. In 1990, researchers began looking for BCR-ABL inhibitors and at Novartis, a pharmaceutical company based in Switzerland, scientist developed a compound designed to reduce BCR-ABL. Jürg Zimmermann and his team set about improving the compound, eventually creating a potent and specific BCR-ABL inhibitor. In 1994, Novartis teamed with Brian Druker and set about refining and readying the inhibitor for clinical trials that began in 1999. Today, the compound now known as Glivec is being hailed as something of a wonder drug. Follow-up data show that Glivec therapy helped 98% of patients in chronic-phase CML stabilise their blood counts. Moreover, in 92 percent of cases, the Philadelphia chromosome was completely disabled, though still present. Patients treated with Glivec followed by a bone marrow transplant, a common course of treatment for CML, experienced a cure rate of 60-80%. Side effects of Glivec tend to be mild and easily manageable, with less than 5% of patients experiencing serious adverse effects. Thanks to the Zimmermann-Druker partnership and the tireless work of other medical researchers, it seems suddenly possible that a cure for cancer may indeed be found in our lifetime. 3. Environment - Joseph Le Mer (France) A heat exchanger of such a brilliantly simple design that it makes heating systems both inexpensive and energy-efficient With climate change wreaking havoc and volatile energy prices affecting home heating costs, the need for both environment friendly and budget-conscious heating systems is greater than ever. Joseph Le Mer’s innovative adaptations on heat exchangers delivered just that. For the past thirty years, Joseph Le Mer has been churning out original inventions in a field not commonly known for groundbreaking change: heating systems. After several rocky starts, in 1993 Le Mer finally hit on the model which would catapult him and his patents to the forefront of this sector. 2 Indeed, an Italian entrepreneur by the name of Rocco Giannoni was so impressed by Le Mer’s ideas that he asked the French inventor to let him finance them, with the two founding Giannoni-France in the town of Morlaix, France. The French inventor’s ranges of heat exchangers are notable for their single-tube design. Other exchangers that work through two or even three tubes suffer from high fabrication costs, difficulty in maintaining a good heat transfer rate and a heavy weight. By contrast, Le Mer’s heat exchangers are not only cheap to manufacture and relatively light-weight, but also more dynamic as the tube can be connected to others either end-to-end or side-by-side to meet different heating needs. In addition to a cheap manufacturing cost, Le Mer’s patents also do not exact a heavy toll on the environment, enjoying an energy-efficiency well above the industry standard. Since Giannoni-France’s founding in 1993, the company has evolved from being a small- to-medium enterprise to a notable player in the world market for heat exchangers. Its growth has been both spectacular and steady: Today, Giannoni counts as its own over 700 employees, produces more than one million exchangers each year and had a 2007 turnover of €135 million. Despite emerging as a major industry leader, Giannoni didn’t follow the trend among Western European manufacturers of outsourcing production to Asia and other industrialising regions to keep costs low. Instead, Le Mer worked on making the production process at home more efficient and hence more cost-effective. As government bodies and environmental groups across Europe and North America increasingly advocate that home and business owners replace traditional boilers with condensing ones to decrease heating costs and increase energy-efficiency, Giannoni, thanks to Le Mer, is already well positioned to capitalise on any market growth in this sector. 4. Non-European Inventors – Zhou Yiqing (China) Anti-malaria drug based on a herbal agent, which has been instrumental in saving hundreds of thousands of lives The fight against the worldwide Malaria pandemic requires inexpensive, yet effective drugs. Armed with ancient medical wisdom, Professor Yiqing Zhou and his team at the Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology in Beijing created a potent new drug in 1992. Malaria is the world’s most devastating parasitic infection in humans. It kills one person every 30 seconds, most of them children under 5 years of age. There is no vaccine, and drugs need to be cheap – the disease is most rampant in impoverished parts of the globe. 3 Searching for an inexpensive treatment, Professor Yiqing Zhou and team at the Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology in Beijing went back to ancient Chinese medicine. After all, malaria has infected humans for over 50 000 years. Chinese scientists became interested in an old herbal remedy known as Artemisia annua, or “Sweet Wormwood”. It was used in China beginning around 168 BC to treat malaria. The herb was rediscovered in 1967 to treat malaria-stricken soldiers during the Vietnam War. As the active ingredient, Chinese Scientists identified a naturally occurring compound called “artemisinin”. Zhou mixed with the herb with a proven anti-malarial agent, benflumetol, to create a new drug, completed in 1996. Cheap to manufacture, Zhou’s drug is highly effective. It achieves control over malaria-related fever in as little as 24 to 36 hours. Cure rates range at over 96% after only 3-4 days of treatment. And the clincher is that there is no problematic drug resistance among malaria strains. Though thousands of years old, the herbal ingredient is “new” to current malaria parasites.
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