Butterflies In The Morning

Aug 16, 2012 by Clinovo    1 Comment     Posted under: Clinical Stories, Event

Last week I attended a morning session of the Bio2Device group. The topic was “Butterfly effect in the pharmaceutical development” by Dr. Jayakumar Rajadas from Stanford University. The butterfly effect, in chaos theory, illustrates how a small change at one place can result in large differences at a later point. In the pharmaceutical industry, this effect has shown to be particularly true on a number of occasions. Dr. Rajadas illustrated multiple occasions. One example was a man who attempted suicide with rat poison, but due to his (fortunate) unsuccessful attempt, led to the discovery of warfarin, the most widely prescribed oral anticoagulant drug in North America. Another example was a pulmonary hypertension drug that was not finding success in its endpoints, however one side effect noticed by the male participants gave way to the discovery of Viagra.

Overall, the session proved to be informative and entertaining. Dr. Rajadas’ own personal experience in the butterfly effect was the discovery of a technique in surgery on arteries and veins. This tricky procedure had difficulty in maintaining artery structure during surgery, but the use of a polaxymer (found in your toothpaste!) allowed for the structure to keep shape and arteries to be reconstructed during surgery in a successful manner. This procedure is now common and comes from innovation and knowledge sharing.

This was a topic addressed during the Q&A session; as R&D is being outsourced, the innovation can be missed. The thinking process happens everywhere, as Dr. Rajadas explained, so the butterfly effect can be bypassed when knowledge is not being shared by collaborators working around you. An effect that also can be missed in a competitive vs. collaborative environment between large Sponsor companies with numerous, unused compounds which didn’t meet their intended use, and Universities (as pointed out by the man sitting to my right).

I left the morning meeting with a smile, having learned how valuable this effect can be in this industry and sharing in the great, thoughtful discussion among my peers.

Joshua Elvert