The readers and editors of R&D Magazine choose the technologies that they expect to see fast growth, large investments, and increasing applications in the coming year.

Click here to enlage Anti-bioterrorism devices, fuel cells, and nanotechnology were the "hottest" technologies likely to experience rapid growth and high investment in 2006, according to a reader survey by the editors of R&D Magazine.

For the second consecutive year, the editors of R&D Magazine performed a survey of our readers in late-November 2005, asking what technologies they expect to be “hot” in 2006. This year’s survey results, looking at more than 70 different technology choices, were in some respects not dramatically different than those obtained last year.

The top five technologies chosen by readers this year, in fact, were the same that were chosen in 2004, with only slight, ordering changes. Anti-bioterrorism devices, for example, was the number one chosen hot technology for 2006 in this year’s survey by 39% of the readers. In last year’s survey (performed in November 2004), anti-bioterrorism devices placed third with 29.5%. Comparing this year’s other four “hottest technologies”, numbers two through five (see bar chart) were fuel cells (No.1 in 2004, 41.4%), nanotechnology (No.2 in 2004, 40.1%), battery/chemical energy (No.5 in 2004, 19.8%), and carbon nanotubes (No.4 in 2004, 21.1%). Both the ranking and the number of respondents choosing these technologies were statistically very similar between the two surveys.

Survey dynamics

Click here to enlage Survey respondents said that the average likelihood of a "hot technology" becoming a commercially successful product is 56%, down slightly from the value that they said in our 2004 hot technology reader survey.

More than 170 readers responded to this year’s survey. Each respondent was asked to choose five technologies. As in last year’s results, the top five technologies chosen mirror the relevant technology issues driving many of today’s research funding programs—that being concerns about terrorism, energy dependence and increasing pollution, and the ability to take commercial advantage of dramatic new technologies (i.e., nanotechnology).

There has been some shifting, however, among technologies that were “hot” last year and have since “cooled” down, and vice versa. Proteomics, for example, which offered a lot of initial hype, was listed fairly high in the rankings in 2004 (No.18), but dropped to No.29 this year. Genomics, on the other hand, appears to be a more practical and shorter term solution to many of the same life science issues. Genomics was ranked No.22 in 2004 and rose to No.15 this year.

Energy issues, following this year’s dramatic swing in prices at the gas pump, saw some equally dramatic swings in technological relevance. Solar/wind power technologies jumped from No.21 in 2004 all the way to No.7 this year. Similarly, while only 4.5% of the survey respondents thought that nuclear power had technological relevance in 2004, that ranking jumped to 7.8% of the respondents in 2005. As noted above, the energy-related fuel cells retained their top 5 ranking from 2004 to 2005, as did battery/chemical energy technologies.

Click here to enlage On average, it takes nearly six years for a discovery to become a "hot technology,"—the same time readers indicated in last year's survey.

A number of “basic” technologies retained respectable, although non-dramatic, rankings. These include bioinformatics, Bluetooth technologies, cell biology, high-performance computing, Internet technologies, microarrays, OLEDs/flexible displays, sensor arrays, and systems biology.

Of even lesser interest in this particular ranking system, were the more mature technologies. These include the likes of chromatography, spectroscopy, optical microscopy, rheology, and telecommunications.

Defining a hot technology
What makes a hot technology? Quite obviously, it’s not always a new technology. One of the questions asked in this survey was how long it took a particular technology to become a “hot” technology. The answer in 2004 and the answer again in 2005 was exactly the same—about six years. Less than 4% of the respondents indicated that it took only one to two years to become “hot.” It should be obvious to most researchers that discoveries take a very long time to become useful tools or technologies, let alone commercial products. The average cycle from discovery to commercial product is often 15 years for everything from ceramics to drugs to golf balls. The fact that these respondents indicated that it took an average of six years to become a hot technology, in this light, may even be wishful thinking on the respondents side.

Click here to enlage Slightly less than 80% of the survey respondents find that it's difficult to obtain investments in a "hot technology," a slight improvement from last year's survey.

In the same vein, the likelihood of one of these hot technologies becoming a successful technology was only indicated as being 56%—just slightly more than 50-50. About 10% of the respondents indicated that the technology was already a success. The editors of course, did not define in the questionnaire as to what being successful meant, so the respondents were left to their own thoughts to define what that might be.

Finding value in technologies
Again, these are hot technologies and likely only about a third through their normal product development cycle. A significant number of them will not likely make it to become commercially viable products, although the majority of them will to varying degrees of success. Consider the changes noted in just one year of this survey, how some very visible technologies like proteomics and even drug discovery saw significant drops in their rankings and hence perceived value by research and development professionals.

Click here to enlage On average, it takes nearly six years for a discovery to become a "hot technology,"—the same time readers indicated in last year's survey.

Only 21% of the survey respondents indicated that they found it relatively easy to obtain investment funding for the development of new hot technologies. The political, technological, social, and economic climate can change very rapidly in just a very short period of time. Witness the effect of the Merck Vioxx drug recall and subsequent lawsuits and how that has affected the development and “hotness” of the pharmaceutical industry. Drug discovery technologies dropped from a hotness ranking of 9 in 2004 to 15 in 2005. Yet the overall technologies in drug discovery have likely improved over that time and the impact of genomics and proteomics in drug discovery is likely starting to show some effect—and yet the ranking dropped.

Wireless, on the other hand, has seen its shares rise in these surveys, from off the chart completely in 2004 to a No.8 ranking in the 2005 survey.
In the following pages, the editors of R&D will describe in a little more detail three of these technologies that we feel are likely to have an impact on the research and development community in 2006 and beyond.

— Tim Studt

There's a Multicore in Your Future
The computer microprocessor evolution that we grew up with was that of traditional speed improvements mostly through regular increases in the microprocessor’s clock frequency. But continuing increases in clock frequencies combined with decreasing feature sizes, have created heat loads and power usage that have become unmanageable. And when you add in factors like memory latency and the inefficiencies of serial architectures, this version of the microprocessor’s evolution starts to hit a performance wall.

Coincidentally for the past decade, researchers have been developing multiprocessing devices and architectures that avoid these bottlenecks, while improving the overall performance of the devices and meeting the needs of an increasingly pervasive connectivity and proactive computing environment.

Enter the multicore microprocessor, which has now been available since April 2005 from both Intel, Santa Clara, Calif., and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Sunnyvale, Calif. And watch out, this change is about to take the world by storm, with Intel already suggesting that by the end of 2006, more than three quarters of all the CPUs produced by the company will be multicore processors. “By 2007, 100% of our server roadmap will be dual-core,” says Steve Pawlowski, Intel Senior Fellow and CTO of Intel’s Digital Enterprise Group. Intel currently has more than 15 multicore products under development across the desktop, mobile, and server computing market segments.

Simultaneous benefits
Multicore microprocessors include two or more full execution cores within a single processor, enabling simultaneous management of computing activities. Intel has already included “instruction-level parallelism” in its processors for about 10 years, which have provided about 6X performance enhancements. This architecture evolved into a “thread-level parallelism”, which increased the level of functional parallelism and processing speed improvements.

By executing more processes in parallel, the designers have actually been able to lower the clock frequency and the voltage, thereby maintaining the same power usage, while providing faster overall execution speeds.

Moreover, multicore processors enable true multitasking. On a traditional single-core device, multitasking can max out the CPU utilization, resulting in decreased performance as operations have to wait to be processed. On a multicore device, since each core has its own cache, the operating system has sufficient resources to handle most compute tasks in parallel. The operating system perceives each of the execution cores as a discrete processor.

Going public
Current products are dual-core versions, although quad-core products are already planned for introduction as early as next year. Intel Pentium M dualcore chips will ship for portable computers in early-2006, with plans for more than 70% of all shipping mobile processors to be multicore devices by the end of 2006.

AMD also has an aggressive roadmap for introducing new multicore devices. As in all devices, there are architectural differences between the AMD and Intel multicore devices, however with similar performance capabilities. AMD already challenged Intel to a multicore performance challenge—Intel declined to participate.

Having a multicore technology available does not negate all the continuing process developments and enhancements being worked on. These performance improvements would just be transferred in the standard means to the processing and enhancement of the individual cores on multicore devices.

Competitive pressures
There are many software programs now available that already can take advantage of multiple processes occurring at the same time. Many workloads such as design simulations, test and gaming applications, or the algorithms used in speech or image recognition programs are highly parallelizable.

An example of performance improvements that can be realized with just a dualcore system include 50% speed improvements for high-definition video encoding, 65% speed improvements for MP3 encoding, 52% speed improvements for rendering of 3-D images, and 124% improvement in gaming while recording multiple TV shows.

Intel has also been working with software developers for some time to enable the development of multithreaded code that can take full advantage of the increased speed of multicore processors. As a result, there already are numerous multithreading tools, resources, and expertise for implementing thread-optimization techniques across a wide range of applications.

Also, while initial prices as in all new device introductions is somewhat high, process improvements would work to drive these price increases down.

On to the “many”
Intel’s multicore roadmap sees single core hyperthreading extending into mid-2006 with multicore (dual, quad, and possibly more) devices increasing the number of computing threads per socket to possibly 10 by 2012. Beginning in 2010, Intel’s plan is to introduce its “many-core” products (hundreds of cores per device), which will increase the number of hyper-threads, to more than 100 about 10 years from now.

— Tim Studt

Resources:
Advanced Micro Devices, www.amd.com,
Intel, www.intel.com, 800-628-8686

RFID Goes More Mainstream
As a technology, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags are nothing new. Many of the components incorporated into these devices can be traced as far back as the 1930s, and the military’s use of long-range, radio transponders in Identify Friend or Foe (IFF) systems. In the 1960s, companies such as Sensormatic, Boca Raton, Fla., and Checkpoint, Thorofare, N.J., extended and commercialized the technology for the purpose of creating RFID-based anti-theft equipment.

Today, RFID tags, and their subsequent readers, are broadly used in manufacturing, retail, and military applications. These activities, however, are poised to get a dramatic upswing with several high-profile initiatives coming into play in 2006.

Getting hot
The renewed commitment into RFID technology comes after more than a decade of uncertainty. Years of reliability issues and high price points caused many groups to cast aside RFID as a viable solution for their inventory/security needs. But these issues have slowly been addressed. Just a few years ago the most basic of a RFID tag would cost anywhere between $1-$5. Today, they are being sold for a fraction of the price, as low as 7.5 cents for latest generation RFID tags. Reliability has also been stepped up. Case in point, in a recent article in Business Week, industry giant, Boeing, Chicago, Ill., noted that their recent adoption of a RFID system “worked 99.8% of the time, failing to read just 21 tags out of more than 18,000.” This accuracy rate towers over the 20% accuracies reported in years past. Fellow industry heavyweight, IBM, Yorktown Heights, N.Y., has also come aboard the RFID bandwagon with a recent $250 million investment in Sensor and Actuators, of which RFID plays a significant role.

Government and industry create a slew of RFID initiatives and solutions. Images: Texas Instruments.

“ RFID technology has matured to the point where it is being deployed by the world’s top retailers and consumer products suppliers, so companies that hold back are risking being passed by more agile and efficient competitors,” noted Doug Martin, IBM’s worldwide Chief Architect for RFID, at a recent symposium held this past July.

Other IT heavyweights are following suit. For its part, Microsoft, Redmond, Wash., has plans to release its own RFID Services Platform by early next year. And let’s not forget about Wal-Mart. When the company announced two years ago that it would roll out RFID technology across its stores and distribution centers, many baulked at the idea. However, by Jan. 2005, more than 100 Wal-Mart stores have been equipped with RFID, with plans to increase that number to 1,000 by the end of 2006.

Government support
Then there are the government-sponsored initiatives. Agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have been actively supporting measures to stimulate the adoption of RFID tags by pharma manufacturers as a means to curb counterfeit drug distribution and profiteering. The goal, according to the agency, is to have all pharma manufacturers enlisting RFID technology by 2007.

The U.S. Dept. of Defense has also become a strong proponent of RFID, announcing that it would require all of its 60,000 plus suppliers to incorporate RFID tags on all deliverables by being 2007. Beginning Jan 1, 2006, suppliers will be required to tag pallets of items, such as packaged petroleum, lubricants, oils, chemicals, construction material, all types of ammunition, and pharmaceutical and medical material being shipped to several military depots throughout the U.S.

Other initiatives are also in the works. In a May 2005 survey conducted by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), the GAO was able to list 28 planned RFID projects across agencies at the cabinet level.

But perhaps it will be the government’s most recent RFID-based mandate that will have most people talking in 2006. In an effort to improve national security, the U.S. State Department recently announced that U.S. passports must be equipped with RFID technology. Starting in Oct 2006, any new or reissued U.S. passports will include an RFID chip containing information such as passport holder’s name, nationality, gender, date of birth, and a digitized photo. It will also store the passport number, issue date, expiration date, and type of passport. State Dept. employees, along with diplomats, are slated to receive the new tagged passports as early as Jan. 2006.

Of course, all these initiatives do not guarantee the success of RFID technology, but they do go along way in qualifying RFID as a “hot” technology.

— Jeannette Mallozzi

Resources:
Dept. of Defense, www.defenselink.mil
U.S. State Dept. www.state.gov

Investing in stem cell research

Many countries have recently declared initiatives on stem cell research and its funding. Of course, recent events such as the resignation of stem cell pioneer, Hwang Woo-Suk, from his position as director of the World Stem Cell Hub has cast a shadow as to possible global collaborative efforts in stem cells. Nevertheless, countries are preparing and following through with their own stem cell programs. Here we examine the direction in which stem cell research is headed in different countries throughout the world.

• Belgium: The Stem Cell Institute in Leuven (SCIL) was established in 2005. Research at this facility will focus on coronary heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. The SCIL has an affiliation agreement to collaborate jointly with the Stem Cell Institute at the Univ. of Minnesota, which allows for research and academic collaboration between the two institutions, including exchange of faculty and students, joint research projects, and conferences.

• Canada: Currently, the Canadian Stem Cell Network coordinates research and brings together researchers from across the country in studying the biology of stem cells, the bioengineering of stem cells, clinical applications, and ethics. Canada is establishing an electronically accessible national registry of human embryonic stem cell lines.

• China: China’s focus in stem cells is centered primarily on moving the science into the clinic rather than on understanding the basic mechanisms of stem cell biology. Researchers are pursuing clinical trials of cell-based therapies to treat brain injury, corneal disease, and neurodegenerative illness.

Stem cells are promising in many different research areas. Global collaborations and initiatives will help further this research. Image: National Institutes of Health.

• Czech Republic: This country is looking to characterize the seven stabilized human embryonic stem cell lines derived at the Laboratory of Molecular Medicine in Brno. Researchers will develop protocols and strategies for neurodifferentiation of human embryonic stem cells. The country’s Ministry of Education also has plans to establish a registry of stem cells in the second half of 2006.

• Denmark: Currently, the Danish Centre of Stem Cell research has a focus on both basic and applied stem cell research. The focal areas are early embryonic development, transgene technologies, and stem cell isolation and differentiation in relation to stem cell-based therapies including brain, liver, pancreas, intestines, blood, and immune system.

• Germany: German researchers promote regenerative medicine and stem cell research regarding tissue engineering, biological replacement of organ function, and cell-based regenerative medicine using embryonic and adult stem cells. Germany’s Research and Education Ministry is preparing a national stem cell strategy paper that will include legal guidelines for German scientists wishing to collaborate with foreign colleagues.

• India: India promotes research for therapeutic applications using adult and embryonic stem cells, as well as bone marrow, peripheral blood, and umbilical cord blood cells.The government is promoting city cluster programs in order to share information, explore collaboration, and discuss emerging policy issues.

• Japan: The emphasis is on fundamental research into developmental biology and the development of techniques using animal models. Using human embryonic stem cell lines derived at Kyoto University, researchers will study the differentiation into, and subsequent application of, endothelial cells, nerve cells, hematopoietic cells, cardiac cells, and hepatocytes. RIKEN is Japan’s flagship research center for stem cells, and the research carried out there focuses on mechanisms of development, mechanisms of regeneration, and scientific bases of regenerative medicine.

• Netherlands: The Dutch Euro-stells Project involves the development of a Stem Cell Toolbox Program to add to the knowledge of the basic features and properties of stem cells in human as well as animal models.

•South Korea: Researchers wish to discover factors which induce stem cell differentiation for therapeutic purposes. They have established the World Stem Cell Hub to supply the results of stem cell research to patients worldwide.

• UK: The UK looks to establish a public-private consortium for the advancement of stem cell technology and to redevelop and maintain the UK Stem Cell Bank, a central facility that characterizes and stores ethically sourced, quality controlled adult, fetal, and embryonic stem cell lines. They will build on the close links established under the UK Stem Cell Initiative to provide effective forums to improve collaboration around research funding, cross-fertilization between scientists, technical experts and private industry and provide a platform for a sustained program of public dialogue on stem cell research over the next decade.

• U.S.: In the coming year, the U.S. will fund a National Stem Cell Bank and two new Centers of Excellence in Translational Human Stem Cell Research. The Stem Cell Bank will consolidate many of the federally funded eligible human embryonic stem cell lines in one location. The Centers of Excellence will bring scientists together to explore how stem cells may be used in the future to treat blood cancers and blood disorders, kidney disease, and neurological disorders.

— Martha Walz

Resources:
National Institutes of Health, http://stemcells.nhi.gov/research/intlresearch.asp
UK Stem Cell Initiative, http://www.advisorybodies.dho.gov.uk.uksci/