Topic of the Month: Heart Stents and Garbage Bags
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There are NO new problems or problem solving principles, just new ways, sometimes separated by years, ignorance, and egos, to apply them.

Would a medical researcher look in the plastic bag literature for an idea to solve a problem? Would a plastic bag manufacturer go to a medical conference for new ideas for garbage bags? Well, why not is the better question.

There have been BILLIONS of dollars spent on heart stent implants, using metal implants which open the artery and then proceed to build up tissue around the metal, frequently requiring second and third surgeries. In this day and age of trying to control medical costs, this seems like a fruitful target for innovation. What are we trying to do here? Open the artery and then leave nothing behind. We want the "thing" or material to be there when we want it to be, and then we want it to go away.

In the trash bag business, it's been a holy grail to have a plastic material that would be strong enough for household use and then SLOWLY dissolve (not break into pieces and blow away) in a harmless form into the environment. Polylactic acid, a derivative of corn products, has been doing this for many years and you can purchase these bags in many locations, including the web.

Well, the twain has finally met. In a "breakthrough" published in Popular Science last month (and medical articles earlier in the year), we have an arterial stent made out of the same plastic material that is now in advanced clinical trials for Abbott. The stent is there when we want it and dissolves away, leaving the wall in place and no place for tissue to grow.

http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2009/03/13/abbotts-search-for-a-disappearing-stent/

Do a Google search on the term "dissolving stents". You will get around 300,000 Google hits and you will see the origins of this work back in 2006. If you do a search on "poly lactic acid" you'll only get 70,000 hits. (Isn't that interesting that poly lactic acid is more of a specialty than heart stents?) Now do a search on "dissolving plastics" and you'll get 1,100,000 hits. Now search "disappearing plastics" and you'll get 9,000,000 hits!! (Dissolving is not the only way to make things disappear--a jargon lesson again). In all these plastics searches you will find many articles around the poly lactic acid polymer that is the highlight of this new stent.

Now my question for all of you to think about is how many billions of dollars, and potential deaths could have been saved if these two industries talked to each other? The medical profession looking outside their closed world of supposed unique problems, and the poly lactic acid producers, infatuated by a large volume trash bag market, not looking at an incredibly small market in terms of volume, but producing incredible value added. How much revenue would there have been to a corn based plastics producer who thought more broadly about applications?

Definitely (corn) food for thought!