I worked summers at my father’s large textile printing mill in Montreal starting at about 12. I became very familiar with heavy machinery, electrical and mechanical engineering and that helped shape me down the road. I did do things that people called inventive. I was on the ski team in high school, but the skis were too large for the trunk of my car. I remember cutting them in half and putting a hinge in the center so I could fold them. I also recall making what may have been the first inline roller skate.
Organic chemistry was my favourite class at McGill because it was very visual and taught exceptionally well by Professor David Harpp.”
I was delighted to win the 2019 Fritz J. and Dolores H. Russ Prize (the world’s top prize in bioengineering) and very happy they found the other four co-winners. They’re all very important names in cardiology. We were honoured for our innovations leading to the widespread adoption of coronary angioplasty. The nylon 12 angioplasty balloon that I developed to first dilate narrowed arteries and later to deploy stents is the first and only commercially successful balloon that is used in virtually all coronary and peripheral vascular angioplasty/stenting procedures today.
One of the problems with the early stents is they were stiff and couldn’t get to the heart. I developed the helical wire stent, which was very malleable – it’s easy to maneuver around curves. It’s now being used by the largest biomedical engineering company in the world.
I then developed the drug carrier material for a drug-eluting stent called TAXUS. In that process, I had to develop a new material to put on the stent that the body didn’t recognize so that, once the drug was fully released, the body wouldn’t realize the foreign entity – the stent – was there. TAXUS was the largest product launch in the history of medical devices with sales of $3 billion in its first year alone.
This new material, technically called poly(styrene-block-isobutylene-block-styrene) and for brevity called “SIBS”, came from my basic understanding of organic chemistry, which I can trace all the way back to David Harpp. It was a very logical chemical structure except no one had ever made it for medical use as most of the medical products were developed by engineers who never took organic chemistry.
SIBS changed the nature of how people think of the foreign body reaction. Its superb biocompatibility and inertness enabled the drug-eluting stent and a game-changing micro-shunt that stops the progression of vision loss from glaucoma – regulatory approval of this shunt in the U.S. and Canada is expected in 2020-2021. Other SIBS-based devices in the works include the next generation intraocular lens for post cataract surgery and a very elegant catheter-deployed heart valve that may eliminate open heart surgery for valve replacement. These new devices could not have been done before or perfected without this invention.
I have 130 U.S. patents. My favourite patent is the one on the use of SIBS in medicine because it came from an understanding of basic science as opposed to tinkering, and it changed the way we think about how the body interacts with foreign materials. Products made from SIBS are helping to treat a myriad of very serious diseases.
Leonard Pinchuk was profiled in the McGill News alumni magazine in 2019.