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At the request, Rospatent experts selected several promising inventions patented over the past year. And we talked with the authors of the developments about what path an idea goes through before entering the market
NICEM them. Gamaleya: vaccine against tuberculosis
The COVID-19 pandemic made the National Research Center for Epidemiology and Microbiology. N.F. Gamaleya is one of the most famous scientific organizations in the country. It was here that the world’s first publicly available registered vaccine against the new coronavirus, Sputnik V, was created.
But besides this invention, the center has many other interesting developments. For example, for the last ten years they have been working on the development of an anti-tuberculosis vaccine.
So far, only the live BCG vaccine is allowed in our country to prevent the disease. “But now new modern drugs are required that could complement its action. In addition, people with HIV infection cannot be vaccinated with live vaccines, ”explains the head of the laboratory of the Center. Gamalei Artem Tkachuk.
According to him, researchers around the world are working on this problem. But the scientists decided to go in a non-standard way and designed an unusual formula. They have developed a substance that helps the cells of the immune system “see” the right ingredients in the drug, develop antibodies to them and form a cellular response.
However, the most difficult thing was not to create this vaccine, but to prove that it has anti-tuberculosis activity. “If we had some other infection in our work, for example, a viral one, then it would be easier to develop a drug,” the expert says. – Many diseases have clear markers of protection: they can be used to track within one to three months whether the drug is working or not. But this does not work with tuberculosis, because it does not have protective antibodies, which determine the effect of the drug.
To date, the second phase of clinical trials of the new vaccine has been fully completed, more than 200 people have received the drug. Scientists have selected an effective dose and proved that an immune response is formed on it, which lasts for at least a year. At the same time, the vaccine is completely safe and well tolerated, the developers emphasize. They also expect the drug to be suitable for HIV-infected patients as well.
Now scientists are waiting for permission from Roszdravnadzor to conduct a third phase of research, which will provide more data on the effectiveness of the drug. “I hope the third phase will not be limited to Russia,” Tkachuk says. — We plan to expand the study to other countries, to reach the international level. We have already held the first consultation with WHO on this matter.”
Since the development of a vaccine requires a long time and multi-stage testing, it is difficult to find funding for such projects, the head of the laboratory admits. At the first phase of the research, the scientists were supported by the Ministry of Industry and Trade, and the Ministry of Health joined the second phase and sponsored the work.
Abroad, such projects are quickly picked up by “big pharma,” Tkachuk notes. There are far fewer such opportunities on the Russian market: companies are not mature enough to participate in long-term developments with a high level of risk. Therefore, scientists hope to implement the third stage together with business in the format of a public-private partnership.
Within two to five years, researchers from the Center. The Gamaleyas want to create a whole system of several drugs that will complement each other’s action. Already registered more than five patents describing a set of inventions. One of the drugs will help shorten the duration of therapy for those patients who already have TB. It has been successfully tested on animals, and now it is necessary to confirm the effectiveness of the development in humans.
The creation of a complex of drugs will make it possible to control the spread of tuberculosis and fulfill the WHO global plan to eradicate this disease by 2030, Tkachuk is sure. “Most likely, the COVID-19 pandemic will slow down the medical community somewhat, because resources and forces have been thrown into the fight against coronavirus. But I hope our drug will help catch up in the coming years, ”the scientist notes.
Melfon Center: AI for hearing test
According to the World Health Organization, today more than 5% of the world’s population, or approximately 430 million people, suffer from disabling hearing loss. Among people over 60, the figure is much higher – about 25%. But often the difficulties begin in childhood.
So, according to the Melfon Hearing and Speech Correction Center, about 10% of children under the age of 12 have hearing problems. “If a child has had untreated otitis media three or four times, then his hearing is likely to deteriorate. And a child who has lost at least 20% of hearing, every two years will lag behind in psychophysical development by about a year. There will be problems with training, getting a profession, ”explains the general director and co-owner of Melfon, Valery Sirotkin.
He emphasizes that the situation is aggravated by the lack of specialists: due to the shortage of audiologists, millions of our countries cannot even theoretically test their hearing. And in children, such tests are carried out mainly in the first year of life, although hearing loss usually occurs between the ages of one and seven years.
Considering all this, Melfon decided to make a cheap and reliable semi-automatic device that will allow pre-medical preliminary hearing tests in patients. The invention was called “Surdoscope”. It is based on artificial intelligence and big data technologies.
For verification, an international test is used, unified for 20 countries. The program generates sentences that an artificial voice pronounces – at the right volume and at the right pace. The patient tries to repeat what he heard, and the device translates the voice into text, compares it with the original version, and evaluates the results. The probability of error here is less than 3%, while with manual calculation, an error rate of less than 20% is considered the norm.
“In addition, our system tests hearing against the background of the so-called competing sound – noise interference. After all, if you hear pure tones well, this does not mean anything. In life, hearing intelligibility is needed, which ensures social and speech adaptation, ”explains Sirotkin.
Standard equipment for testing hearing – an audiometer – costs about ₽2 million. The development of Melfon is orders of magnitude cheaper. It uses a seven-inch tablet and headphones with a total cost of about 32 thousand rubles, as well as software that the company has been working on for a year and a half.
Last year, Melfon applied for an invention, and in February 2021, the development was officially patented. “We already have requests from the countries of Southeast Asia: they are ready to register our invention there and start distributing it,” says Sirotkin.
However, in our country there are difficulties with this. Although the system is intended for pre-hospital hearing testing, it is required to be registered as a medical device, the developer says. If the procedure is still possible to pass, the devices can be used in schools, feldsher-obstetric stations, mobile complexes for diagnostics and prevention. But taking into account the difficulties that have arisen, Melfon plans to first register the system in Asian or European countries, for example, in Germany or Switzerland.
Group-IB: “smart” protection against bots
Internet users are constantly dealing with “smart” bots, although they do not always know about it. “Good” bots help you order food, buy tickets online, send packages, and get relevant information for search queries. And the “bad” ones steal copyrighted content from sites, get into personal accounts, collecting confidential data, leave thousands of spam comments and fake reviews, and can also “put down” the site, generating countless requests. At the same time, up to 60% of the activity of malicious bots are attacks using stolen credentials, according to Group-IB (a Skolkovo resident), which specializes in information security and protection against cyber threats.
About a year and a half or two years ago, a large customer contacted the company, who was looking for a solution to protect against bots, says Pavel Krylov, head of Group-IB’s online fraud countermeasures. However, the technologies that existed at that time did not completely remove the problem.
According to Krylov, the main drawback of popular products is that the activity of a bot or a person is checked only at a specific moment, and not throughout the entire session of work on the resource. When a user wants to get into his personal account on the site, register or perform other active actions in the system, he is checked using captcha. As a result of successful validation, a token is generated that is reused in subsequent requests to the resource. But this token can be copied by scammers and reused for requests to the site’s servers. That is, having solved the captcha once, attackers get the opportunity to terrorize the site with direct requests, overcoming popular protections without any tricks.
Trying to solve the client’s problem, the company created a fundamentally new development – “smart” protection Preventive Proxy. “The essence of our innovation is that for each request to the site servers, a unique token is generated. It does not repeat and is used only once, so it is useless to copy it. In fact, we apply the concept of zero trust, that is, we check each request, ”explains the author of the idea, Krylov.
Smart protection uses machine learning and behavioral analysis algorithms to detect malicious bot activity without blocking requests from trusted sources or from legitimate bots, such as search engines. Unlike most existing solutions, the development allows you to protect not only the desktop channel, but also mobile access.
The most difficult thing for developers was to find companies that were ready to test the solution not in the laboratory, but “live” on their online audience, the head of the direction notes.
One of the first developments in our country was implemented by the hh.ru recruiting platform. In one week of testing, 27 million hits to the site were recorded, of which 1,1% were performed by malicious bots. At the same time, requests to hh.ru from legitimate search engine bots (Yandex, Google, Mail, Bing) accounted for less than 1%. Despite the high load on the platform, the piloted Preventive Proxy accurately detected and blocked malicious activity, skipping requests from legitimate bots.
In October 2020, the company widely announced the development and received a patent for the algorithm by the end of the year. And the invention itself was included in the list of the best according to Rospatent. Now the Preventive Proxy module is included in a comprehensive system to combat online fraud, which already protects 160 million users – customers from the banking and e-commerce sectors.
“The assessment of Rospatent is a very important event for the Group-IB team. We have a program to support inventors: each employee has the opportunity to become an inventor, patent their idea in our country, the USA, Singapore, the Netherlands and other countries,” emphasizes Krylov.
Today, the company has about twice as many ideas that have been filed or are about to be filed as it has registered patents. “This proactive approach helps us protect intellectual property, which gives us a competitive edge in the marketplace. At the same time, this increases the cost of the development itself, ”concludes Krylov.