Innovation: Tech Pioneers

Who??says??there's??no??such??thing??as??a??eureka??moment? Physicist David Grier sure had one. Grier and graduate student Eric Dufresne were trying to build a new kind of "optical trap"--a device that splits a laser beam and uses it to capture particles of a single substance. They knew that multiple traps, used in tandem, could let scientists play traffic cops on a molecular level, separating a substance into component parts--removing bacteria from blood, for example. For a year, Grier and Dufresne had been trying out fancy glass splitters, but nothing had done the trick. As a joke, Grier tried a $5 piece of plastic. "It should not have worked," he says. But it did: the "cheesy piece of plastic" split the laser beam into 16 parts, which gave the two scientists the potential to capture 16 separate substances. It was the breakthrough they had long been after. "We were stunned," Grier recalls.

That aha! has paid off. Soon afterward, in 2000, Grier co-founded Arryx, an optical-equipment company whose laser gear can grab, trap and move minute particles of just about anything. The firm expects to make a profit this year--impressive progress for a biotech start-up. Arryx is one of 29 "Technology Pioneers" chosen by the World Economic Forum, the Geneva-based nonprofit organization best known for its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, which opens this year on Jan. 26. Others on the pioneers list--including technologists in the fields of energy, biotech and information--have become entrepreneurs too. The biotech scientists have achieved some extraordinary breakthroughs, but to do that, many had to leave comfortable corporate or academic jobs in which they were confined by institutional thinking.

At the California Institute of Technology, for example, Bassil Dahiyat and his professor Stephen Mayo ran into resistance when they proposed a new approach to fighting disease. They argued that because protein shapes vary according to their functions, it should be possible to create new disease-fighting proteins by first imagining their shape. "You could hear the people at Caltech snicker," says Dahiyat.

Determined to prove the naysayers wrong, Dahiyat went to the supercomputer at Caltech's famed Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "I said, 'Here's the shape I want to make. Tell us the sequence,'" he recalls. By the end of the day, the computer gave him billions of possible amino-acid combinations and recommended the best one. Dahiyat threw that sequence into a small, tunnel-like device. About a minute later, he noticed that the protein was taking form. "I could see it wasn't spaghetti," he says. "I said, 'Oh, my God, we've got structure!'"

Dahiyat and his professor may have the last laugh. In 1997 they founded Xencor, with Dahiyat in charge, based on the protein-creation process called Protein Design Automation (PDA) that they had refined on the supercomputer. If all goes as planned, in about a year Xencor will start human trials of a protein that combats multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and other diseases. Xencor has signed contracts with Genentech, Eli Lilly and other companies to develop additional drugs.