Improving Lives Through Innovation at Johnson & Johnson

Meet the Man Who’s Inventing New Ways to Help Millions of Diabetes Patients

By Ginny Graves

Date: July 15, 2016

What do Disney theme park rides, rubber bands, NASA medical robots and electric vehicles all have in common?

Answer: The man who’s either helped invent or develop them.

Meet Adrian Chernoff, Johnson & Johnson’s new Worldwide Vice President for Research & Development and Innovation in Diabetes Care, who’s tasked with applying his prodigious inventiveness to designing simpler and more efficient insulin-delivery and glucose management systems.

It’s a need that’s acute: Fully half of all people with diabetes don’t take their medications as often as they should. And with nearly 30 million people in the U.S. suffering from diabetes—and 422 million worldwide—Chernoff’s innovation prowess has the potential to revolutionize their lives.

So we sat down with Chernoff, 44, to find out where his creative spark comes from—and how he plans to spin that into innovative, yet practical, solutions for people with diabetes.

When did you first realize you had a knack for inventing things?

Adrian Chernoff: I started sketching and drawing ideas when I was 5 or 6. I remember looking at the batteries that went into one of my toys and thinking: Why is it shaped like that? Wouldn’t it be easier if batteries were spheres, like ball bearings?

Where does this innovative streak come from?

It’s nature and nurture.

My parents played a huge role in my creativity. My dad, a retired Navy captain who worked for the Department of Energy, is a tinkerer at heart. While he has a knack for looking at broken things and fixing them, I have a knack for seeing things that don’t exist and creating them.

So he showed me the nuts and bolts of building, but my mom helped me believe that anything is possible. She was a teacher in a program for gifted students, and any time I came up with an idea, she’d say, “You could create that.”

In 2004, when Staples held a competition for new product ideas, my mom encouraged me to enter. I was the Chief Vehicle Architect at General Motors at the time and was incredibly busy, but a week before the deadline, I sketched out a few ideas and submitted them. One was a rubber band with a tear-resistant label attached to it that I called Rubber Bandits. Staples chose it from some 8,000 entries and brought it to market.

You hold 89 patents. Where do you get your ideas?

If I sit with a blank piece of paper and let my mind wander, I can come up with new ideas. It’s like ideas are inside me just waiting to come out. You’ve heard of chess players who can see two or three moves ahead? I’m like that when it comes to seeing things that haven’t been invented yet.

What’s the coolest thing you’ve ever invented?

The electrified skateboard platform I designed for General Motors. It’s four wheels attached to a platform that rides beneath the car, freeing up the engine, body and everything else that rides above it. This means the body of the vehicle can be more easily customized with new vehicle designs or software upgrades, whether for repairs or to accommodate a new design. Tesla uses it—and has it on display at many of their dealerships to this day.

Your design work is so diverse! What’s the unifying thread?

A customer-first point of view. My ideas all revolve around identifying ways to address an unmet need. I always start with one basic question: How can I make things simpler, more engaging or more interesting?

How is healthcare innovation similar to what you’ve done in the past?

There are lots of technical problems to solve—from scientific to regulatory—as well understanding the customer’s needs. In this case, what are the patients’ needs? Is it to make them healthier? Take their pain away? Make them feel safer at night?

Once you identify those needs, you can start brainstorming solutions.

What excites you most about the projects you’re working on right now?

Research shows that more than half of respondents in one survey reported skipping insulin they knew they should take.  So we’re focusing on developing insulin-delivery systems that are less cumbersome and don’t require much thought or effort.

One thing we’re excited about is a continuous predictive closed loop system—often called an “artificial pancreas”—that could deliver insulin when you need it. It would help people maintain much tighter glycemic control and reduce the number of dangerous hyper- and hypoglycemic events.

We’re also working on the OneTouch Via—a wearable, on-demand insulin delivery system that allows patients to discreetly deliver rapid-acting, or bolus, insulin at mealtimes. If they are having a snack or a meal and they need insulin, they’d just pinch the device between their thumb and forefinger a few times and get the required dose. It should be available in the U.S. as soon as next year.

What appeals to you about being on the leading edge of medical innovation?

Before I took this job, I had no idea how widespread this disease was: Diabetes will affect over 700 million people globally by 2025. Until this point, many diabetes treatments were designed from a doctor-first perspective. But if we can do customer-first innovation, the patient is more likely to use it—and everyone wins.

I feel like the boy who found the golden ticket to be working in this arena, at this moment in history.

We’re building great things on our team—and we can’t wait to share it with patients.

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URL: www.blogjnj.com/2016/07/meet-the-man-whos-inventing-new-ways-to-help-millions-of-diabetes-patients/