Binns, Franklin and De Ford, Christian
“Creativity is a process of developing and expressing novel ideas that are likely to be useful. The end result of the creative process is an innovation, where innovation is the embodiment, combination, and or synthesis of knowledge in novel, relevant, valued new products, processes or services”.1 This statement suggests that in order to innovate, a country must follow a solid creative process and its universities can´t be out of that plan. Innovation thus, refers to incremental and emergent, radical and revolutionary changes in every aspect. Even the improvement of a known product or service can be considered as an innovation.
Costa Rica is a third world country seeking to overcome that veil that has stopped it from growing. Even so, its health system is available to every Costa Rican and world habitant without any cost. The pharmaceutical industry in Costa Rica was established nearly 50 years ago promoted by few entrepreneurs. The introduction of this important industry to the country has supplied many of the needs regarding the health of Costa Ricans. Nowadays, this small Central American country has one of the greatest life spans of the world (nearly 78 years) showing that our system works but is still not optimal. National pharmaceutical industry has experienced a slow development compared to other countries. More effort has to be done in order to accomplish higher goals and produce more innovative pharmaceutical products without leaving aside the good manufacturing practices. In hand with this, the local companies should take into account the innovative ideas created in the academic field, made by students, teachers or both of them.
Since two years ago (from 2008 until now), the School of Pharmacy from University of Costa Rica and its council (one of the first founded academic organizations in Costa Rica), decided to improve the skills of creativity and research for its students and its teachers, respectively.
The objective of this paper is to give a general idea of how these changes in this school have altered the student´s dynamics and how the relationship of our school with local pharmacy companies has improved radically by researching on crucial topics like the pharmacological activity of endemic natural products.
Since 1990 until now, almost 50 projects have been done in the school. Even when this school is one of the oldest in the University of Costa Rica, the recorded data on researching projects have never existed as a formal database; these 50 projects have been taken from the official website of the school.2 From these projects, the 50% of them are related to local natural products. For example, the research on Quassia amara´s (Hombre Grande) in vivo gastrointestinal activity has developed three important research projects which have served as key projects to develop the relationship with LISAN S.A., a local pharmaceutical generic company. Even when the in vivo activity was tested with the pure water extract and not with the quassins (the pure compounds that are supposed to have the activity, the relationship with the company and the outstanding results have created a trustable environment with them and more detailed and deeper research projects are being written to be developed in upcoming years. These projects are based on developing in vitro activity methods to study the cytotoxic potential of the most useful plants in Costa Rica, but they will take place in a close future.
Unfortunately, those students who preferred deeper research topics based on in vitro activity of pure secondary metabolites or well characterized crude extracts, have not found the right environment to perform their researches at University of Costa Rica. They had to seek new academic sponsors outside the school. In this way, two interesting investigations have been done with the Institute of Pharmaceutical Biology and Biotechnology from Albert-Ludwigs University in Freiburg, Germany. One of them demonstrated the wound healing activity of a water-based extract from a local root bark of a tree by stimulating migration and proliferation of fibroblasts, and the other one showed cytotoxicity and apoptosis induction of Costa Rican secondary metabolites. The results are still unpublished and are being evaluated to define the degree of innovation and if they are useful in the pharmaceutical industry; in order to be patented. If a patent comes, this will be the first patent of the school since its foundation.
The Albert-Ludwigs University at Freiburg possesses a wide range of research and development labs with multidisciplinary teams with one aim in common, discover and innovate. The experience of these two students in this university have opened their minds and made them realize that pharmacy is much more than what they think. These experiences gathered here made them want to change the pharmacy in Costa Rica, enhancing the investigation of this small country and changing the minds of scientists in order to exploit the knowledge and desire to innovate.
Regarding innovation, the school has opened a new course named ‘Innovation Management for Health Sciences’, this course is now official in the curriculum of the career. The topic of creativity is based on the improvement of known products or services; this is critical in the methodology. The effect of the course in the student´s dynamics is evident; from the nearly 100 new ideas generated in the course (from 2008 until now) and which are product of lateral thinking techniques based on the Bono experience, all of them have been evaluated by important institutions that promote the entrepreneurship environment in Costa Rica. They have participated in entrepreneurship and risk capital contests. From these contests almost 3 ideas have won the first prize and two of them have been established as formal small companies (see chart 1). The University of Costa Rica by its academic mentors has given the right formation to students in themes like intellectual property rights. Also, the University of Costa Rica by the Unit of Technological Transfer- PROINNOVA- runs with all expenses of the trademark registration. The monitoring of the students and their company is a daily responsibility of the mentor and PROINNOVA.
We consider that this new way of thinking (reflected in the curriculum), has to be instilled from college. The Schools of Pharmacy in Costa Rica, and mainly that from the University of Costa Rica, must ensure that the new generation of future scientists and researchers think in that way, promoting innovation for the future. Several specialties have to be introduced in those schools to achieve this goal such as: genetics, biotechnology, molecular and cellular biology, and strengthen the clinical pharmacology (these specialties are well established in the German Universities). These changes will allow the country to move on this globalized world and fulfill the development expectations of innovation creating new opportunities for young professionals. Defining these new roles and strengthening knowledge is looking into the future, with the hand of the local pharmaceutical industry and the academy.
References:
1-Leonard, D., Swap, W. When Sparks Fly. The knowledge. 1st ed. USA: Harvard Business School Press. 1999.
2-www.farmacia.ucr.ac.cr
Authors´ information.
Dr. Franklin Binns (franklin.binns@ucr.ac.cr) is a pharmacist and M.Sc. student in medicinal natural products field at the Chemistry School, University of Costa Rica
Dr. Christian De Ford is a pharmacist and he has researched in costa rican medicinal natural products field for his undergraduate thesis at the School of Pharmacy, University of Costa Rica
