Spinouts are typically characterised by two main features – ground-breaking research that could have a profound impact on society and a potentially high commercial value. The fact that spinouts still largely emerge out of life and physical sciences can make the first part of that equation an easy story to tell.
The announcement of Nobel laureates for 2018 has exposed the public once again to world-changing research emerging out of universities. Among this year’s laureates are Frances Arnold, the Linus Pauling professor of chemical engineering, bioengineering and biochemistry at California Institute of Technology, who figured out how to use directed evolution to engineer enzymes. What sounds like an inaccessibly complicated technology actually has profound implications for a wide range of sectors – it can, for example, be used to produce renewable fuels and develop pharmaceuticals with a reduced environmental impact.
Another laureate is James Allison, professor of immunology and executive director of immunotherapy platform at University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Centre, whose research has led to new treatments for some of the deadliest forms of cancer.
Other research – such as “Human saliva as a cleaning agent for dirty surfaces” or “Shouting and cursing while driving: frequency, reasons, perceived risk and punishment” – primarily just sounds, well, weird. Such research is honoured by the Ig Nobel prizes, awarded each year in the run-up to the Nobel prize by Improbable Research, partly as a parody and partly to shine a light on the less obvious research being conducted in labs around the world. Both the aforementioned scientific papers were winners this year.
The good-natured seemingly silly Ig Nobel has a scarcely guarded secret – its laureates add to the wider scientific understanding of things that are actually not that silly at all.
In 2006, for example, the Ig Nobel prize for physics went to research into why dry spaghetti tends to break into more than two pieces when bent. It sounds like a waste of money, but that understanding first led to new features in popular graphics editor Adobe Illustrator – which added a bendy paintbrush based on the physics of broken spaghetti – and finally it turned out that studying how cracks spread in dry pasta could be applied to other things too, such as predicting imminent failure in bridges or the breaking of human bones – the latter was the subject of a paper, “Controlling fracture cascades through twisting and quenching”, in August this year.
Earlier this month, HydroGlyde Coatings, a Boston University spinout, made headlines for something that most in the western world would consider mundane – condoms. Known to be the only contraceptive that prevents both pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections, you could argue that there really is not much researchers could do to improve condoms further. You would be wrong.
Mark Grinstaff, professor of chemistry in the university’s College of Arts and Sciences and professor of biomedical engineering in the College of Engineering, co-led the interdisciplinary research team that unveiled a new design in the Royal Society Open Science Journal. The team was made up of 11 researchers also co-led by Ducksoo Kim, professor of radiology in the School of Medicine.
Grinstaff said: “Preventing the spread of HIV and other diseases is critically important – that really was the driving force for creating new technology here.”
It took the researchers three years to develop the new self-lubricating condoms following a call for proposals from philanthropic organisation the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to increase the use of condoms around the world.
Poor lubrication is a regularly self-reported factor in why people do not use condoms, with claims that it causes discomfort. So, developing a coating that captures moisture rather than, like pure latex, repels it, could prove revolutionary not just in more remote areas where access to lubricants might be restricted but also in cities across the developed world where sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis and gonorrhoea are on the rise.
HydroGlyde is led by chief executive Stacy Chin, one of the study’s co-authors who researched the technology as part of her PhD thesis at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
HydroGlyde Coatings may not be a typical example of a spinout at first glance, but in fact it really is. It takes not only the brilliance of researchers to look at something as common as a condom and figure out how to improve it, but also the vision of tech transfer staff who recognise that not every technology that comes across their desk has to be about cancer or sustainable energy.
You could argue it is a waste of resources to reinvent the wheel, but such thinking only prevents you from developing a better wheel. Just how many other things do we take for granted while a researcher is quietly revolutionising it in a lab somewhere?
