Gavriel Iddan used to be a rocket scientist for Rafael, a company that is one of the principal weapons developers for the IDF. He specialized in the sophisticated electro-optical devices that allow missiles to “see” their target. Rockets might not be the first place one would look for medical technology, but Iddan had a novel idea: he would adapt the newest miniaturization technology used in missiles to develop a camera within a pill that could transmit pictures from inside the human body.
Many people told him it would be impossible to cram a camera, a transmitter, and light and energy sources into a pill that anyone could swallow. Iddan persisted, at one point going to the supermarket to buy chickens so he could test whether the prototype pill could transmit through animal tissues. He started a business around these pill cameras, or PillCams, and named his company Given Imaging.
In 2001, Given Imaging became the first company in the world to go public on Wall Street after the 9/11 attacks. By 2004, six years after its founding, Given Imaging had sold 100,000 PillCams. In early 2007, the company hit the 500,000 PillCams mark, and by the end of 2007 it had sold almost 700,000.
Today, the latest generation of PillCams painlessly transmit eighteen photographs per second, for hours, from deep within the intestines of a patient. The video produced can be viewed by a doctor in real time, in the same room or across the globe. The market remains large and has attracted major competitors; the camera giant Olympus now makes its own camera in a pill. That other companies would get into the act is not surprising, since ailments of the gastrointestinal tract are responsible for more than thirty million visits to doctors’ offices in the United States alone.
The story of Given Imaging is not just one of technology transfer from the military to the civilian sectors, or of an entrepreneur emerging from a major defense technology company. It is an example of a technology mashup, of someone combining not only the disparate fields of missiles and medicine but integrating a staggering array of technologies—from optics, to electronics, to batteries, to wireless data transmission, to software, in order to help doctors analyze what they are seeing. These types of mashups are the holy grail of technological innovation. In fact, a recent study by Tel Aviv University revealed that patents originating from Israel are distinguished globally for citing the highest number and most diverse set of precedent patents.3
One such mashup, a company that has bridged the divide between the military and medicine, is Compugen, whose three founders—president Eli Mintz, chief technology officer Simchon Faigler, and software chief Amir Natan—met in the IDF’s elite Talpiot program. Another Talpiot alumnus at Compugen, Lior Ma’ayan, said that twenty-five of the sixty mathematicians in the company joined through their network of army contacts.
In the IDF, Mintz created algorithms for sifting through reams of intelligence data to find the nuggets that have been so critical to Israel’s successes in hunting terrorist networks. When his wife, a geneticist, described the problems they had in sifting through enormous collections of genetic data, Mintz thought he might have a better way to do it.
Mintz and his partners were about to revolutionize the process of genetic sequencing. Merck bought Compugen’s first sequencer in 1994, a year after the start-up was founded and long before the human genome had been successfully mapped. But this was just the beginning. In 2005, Compugen transformed its business model and moved into the drug discovery and development arena, and did so using techniques different from those that dominate the pharmaceutical industry.
Combining mathematics, biology, computer science, and organic chemistry, Compugen has been pioneering what it calls “predictive” drug development. Rather than testing thousands of compounds, hoping to hit upon something that “works,” Compugen’s strategy is to begin at the genetic level and develop drugs based on how genes express themselves through the production of proteins.
A major aspect of Compugen’s approach is its unusual combination of “dry” (theoretical) and “wet” (biological) labs. “Imagine working with Big Pharma overseas or in another part of the country,” Alon Amit, Compugen’s VP for technology, explained. “The back and forth that you can expect is a lot slower than if you have the biologists and mathematicians literally on the same floor discussing what to test, how to test, and inform the models.”4
Though Israel’s largest company, Teva, is in pharmaceuticals, as are Compugen and a number of new Israeli companies, the more crowded field for Israeli start-ups is that of medical devices, many of them related to drug delivery. This field seems to nicely fit the Israeli penchant for multidisciplinary thinking, as well as Israelis’ characteristic lack of patience —since drugs take so long to develop.
One such mashup-based company is Aespironics, which has developed an inhaler the size and shape of a credit card that includes a breath-powered wind turbine. The problem with many inhalers is that they are tricky and expensive to manufacture. A way must be found to release the drug effectively through a wire mesh. In addition, this process must be timed perfectly with the breath of the patient to maximize and regulate the drug’s absorption in the lungs.
