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Q: Dr. Larichev, Dr. Otten, good morning and welcome to NATO.
Dr. Leonard John Otten: Thank you.
Dr. Andrey Larichev: Thank you.
Q: Let me begin by saying congratulations. Today, you received from the NATO Secretary General the 2003 Science Partnership Prize for your collaboration on a breakthrough high resolution imaging system for examining the human retina.
What were your reactions when you were told that you won the NATO prize?
Dr. Otten: Well, let me start with that... You know, a recognition by your peers is the best of all recognition that people in the technical community certainly like to receive. And this prize had that, it had, you know... We were selected because, not necessarily, of the work we had done by the politicians or the members of the states here, but by the work that was actually accomplished, the technical work that was accomplished. And that was particularly important.
Dr Larichev: It also was a very pleasant time when I learned about this recognition and I think that it's greatly because we're doing something useful for all people, I mean, the medical application.
Q: Dr. Otten, you spoke about the technical work accomplished, why is the imager such a breakthrough?
Dr. Otten: That's an interesting question. People who have been working in this area for a number of years, we're not the only researchers in the world who have attempted to do this high resolution imaging. What was very different about our approach was that we worked toward having an instrument that was made for clinical applications, where a physician or an ophthalmologist could eventually have this as a tool in his office to look at different pathologies that might be on the eye.
This is a little bit different from other approaches been done before. They were large research devices that cover many square meters of laboratory space, that were very, very difficult to operate, could not be operated by a technician... unskilled technician, needed several scientists hovering over this instrument just to make it work. Very awkward to collect information.
And so, the approach that we took was could we turn that kind of a research project into something that eventually will have application on a more daily routine.
Q: And Dr. Larichev, because your collaboration was part of the Science for Peace grant from NATO, what role did NATO's support play in the project?
Dr Larichev: I think that NATO support plays a key role in this project because without the support, we was(sic) unable to even start this activity because this is quite complicated and expensive project from a technical point of view and from point of view of financing. And it's also quite...
Dr. Otten: Well, I think one, you know, one of the things that this NATO, particularly the Science for Peace project brought to this was Science for Peace allowed the participant, and particularly the partner country, to purchase hardware, laboratory equipment, and that's notably different than other NATO programmes. In fact, a lot of programmes I think that have been with Russia and former Soviet Union countries is they've provided, oh, maybe travel costs, go to conferences...
Dr Larichev: Right.
Dr. Otten: I think there are occasions where they've supplemented incomes. But none of them had the opportunity actually to augment your laboratory equipment. And this particular project was very heavily hardware-oriented and so without that NATO participation, it just never would have occurred.
Q: Dr. Larichev, you are from Russia and Dr. Otten, you're from the United States. How did you work and your collaboration work in practice? Were there any difficulties you had to overcome and are there any positive experiences you could tell us about?
Dr Larichev: Yes. First time, we had a quite difficult time establishing the collaboration, but right now we have a quite well established protocol, how we are doing mutual session development.
We visit for example, I visit you in the United States and Dr. Otten and colleagues visit in Russia. So, we have our project reviews, reporting, studying how a treatment is working, and we also conducted the medical studies in United States. So we have one of the machines installed in the United States. So we have two of them: one in Russia and one in the United States, so we can make comparative studies and find out... know all applications of this technology.
Dr. Otten: From my point of view, the technical interface was just excellent. It was very easy, very quick, worked very well. There were no difficulties at all, I think, amongst the technical discussions and how we should proceed and what we were doing and what the results meant.
I think the operative word is bureaucratic, administrative portions had a steep learning curve. It took us a while to understand, both from Andrey's and my part since we're, you know, not necessarily bankers, I mean, simple things like how do you transfer money or how do you buy a piece of hardware and how do you get reimbursed for it correctly, were all items that took a while for us to understand.
I think one of the items that did for my company, because I come from a commercial business, it helped me understand how do you do business in Russia. It's different than we're used to in the United States and we've learned a great deal on that. We have a lot to more to learn in there but we've certainly set the basis for that.
Also spent a lot of time on an airplane. One of the things the Science for Peace project encouraged was communications between the partners and both directly and at technical conferences, symposium sorts of things. And we took advantage of that. I would go over to see Andrey two to three times a year and Andrey was back over to see us, you know, on similar types of visits. So that was really important.
While the Internet really works well and you can send information back and forth, there's nothing like actually sitting around with a peace of equipment or whatever the problem is and discussing that in Andrey's laboratory vice trying to do that every other day on an e-mail.
Q: And speaking about the practical implications of your work, you mentioned that a lot of your work, when you approached the project, was on how it could be used in practice, do you also expect this project to have commercial benefits?
Dr. Otten: We certainly hope so! (Laughs) We have been submitted and been awarded a U.S. patent on this instrument, a fairly comprehensive patent that is authored by myself, Andrey, and a third colleague are the named inventors on that. And both the organisations that were involved are the holders of that patent, and they constituted the basis for an intellectual property agreement between ourselves.
Q: In terms of day-to-day medical work, how will this imager change work in a clinic, in a hospital? What do you see as its main impact?
Dr Larichev: It's difficult to tell now. But it's a general practice in all cases when the doctors would like to screen patients for any kind of retinal pathologies, they may go with our instrument because it produces a better resolution, much more data than any commercially available system on the market.
So, we'll see what's happening in the future because right now we have only two devices. But possibly in a few years, it may be quite a diffused technology, at least in the leading hospitals.
Dr. Otten: I agree with that. We saw an interesting example of that when we were setting the instrument up in the United States and we were to use it initially over there, we just had a subject that came in with nothing particularly identified wrong with him. And we observed a lesion on his retina that turned out to be of medical significance, never been observed before during using normal examination techniques. And so... And he went and had surgery done and it helped cure that or fix that. So, we know that is there.
And I think the two large applications, one is the one that Andrey talked about, which is the clinical use of course. The other one that we've received a lot of interest in from pharmaceutical companies and research groups is using this instrument to examine in detail the efficacy of various types of new treatments, drug treatments or procedural treatments and how they've been developing over time. We think that, not just ourselves, but others have indicated that's a potentially powerful capability that this kind of device and approach technology will bring to future users.
Q: To Dr. Larichev, joint scientific collaboration is a new aspect of the NATO-Russia relationship which is changing in general, do you expect this project to have high visibility in Russia as an example of this new type of co-operation?
Dr Larichev: Surprisingly, this project, even in the initial stages, had quite a high visibility in...as Russian scientific community and medical community, which is even more important because they are future users of this technology.
And also, the name of NATO as a supporting institution attracts a lot of attention to this project because it looks very unusual, at least for the doctors because they never heard about the practice where NATO support their medical-oriented research.
Dr. Otten: Just as kind of an interesting follow-up to that, which Andrey won't pass on to you because he's too modest, but this type of research and maybe this specifically was one of the impetus for establishing a new department at Moscow State University in medical physics.
Dr Larichev: Right. Medical physics.
Dr. Otten: And because of the type of research that this project was able to support, it underlined the, I think, how critical it was to get the physics, the science of physics latched up to directly medical applications. And they have in fact created this new department. They have, I think, some of their original new students have started and they're going to be granting degrees in this speciality.
Q: Because, obviously, this project has been successful in many, many ways, which you have talked about, are you looking forward to other joint projects?
Dr Larichev: I think that we already have...(Laughs)...during projects. So we continue development of the second generation of this Fundus imagining systems which will be more easy to operate for clinical usage. And we also have developed... there are several components which can be utilised in... as a medical equipment and possibly Dr. Otten can tell you more about this.
Dr. Otten: We have. We've been fortunate in that the... not only this high resolution imager, which was the main focus, has spun off some technologies which we didn't realise the value of at the time, and we have received substantial joint funding in that.
Andrey has had opportunities within Russia directly. We've had some in the United States but more importantly, we've had a number of which are focused with both of us doing work. In fact, I think in December, we have a final design review on a new instrument that will be held over in Russia where Andrey's cadre is doing the design of a new type of device. And we've gotten substantial interest in that to the tune of severals of millions of U.S. dollars in future funding that go out a number of years, to allow us to continue, not just direct development on this particular type of hardware, but on very, very closely related pieces of equipment.
Q: Thank you very much.
Dr. Otten: You're very welcome.
Q: And congratulations again.
Dr. Otten: Thank you.
Dr Larichev: Thank you very much.