He is not the kind of man to pat himself on the back. Quietly, Hubert Pellikaan holds 23 patents for medicines that spare a lot of suffering. An engaging conversation with an inspiring inventor.
According to ChatGPT, deep tech(nology) encompasses disruptive technologies based on fundamental scientific research and advanced engineering. Unlike shallow tech, these innovations solve complex societal problems, require long research and development trajectories, and demand significant venture capital before they are ready for the market.
This definition is not even necessary to make a deep tech bow to Hubert Pellikaan (61), who, as a pharmacist and product developer in the pharmaceutical industry, is a full-time inventor with 23 patents to his name, of which the wart remover Forwarts is the most well-known. “For me, everything revolves around products. I love developing products and/or contributing to them. I use my pharmaceutical knowledge and creativity to create products within the pharmaceutical sector. I do this as a consultant, but also in other forms of collaboration.”
At the moment, he is working on the development of two different nasal sprays. One is intended for people with a serious deficiency of vitamin B12. "Vitamin B12 is absorbed extremely poorly into the bloodstream when taken as a pill. I’m talking about less than 1 percent. A nasal spray works much more effectively for B12 than a tablet. About 20 to 25 percent of the beneficial substances are absorbed into the bloodstream through the mucous membrane in the nose.”
Within fifteen minutes
A spray also works faster. A pill takes one to two hours before it starts working, while a nasal spray does that within fifteen minutes, just like an injection. The advantage of a nasal spray is that you don’t need to go to the doctor for it. You can use it at home, without the hassle of needles. In a “milder” dosage—the dietary supplement version—this nasal spray, which I developed together with Pronova Laboratories in Muiden, is already on the market. As a dietary supplement, however, this nasal spray is ten times less potent than as a medicine. That’s why you don’t need a prescription for it, unlike medicines, which are only provided with a doctor’s prescription. We are still working on the nasal spray intended as medication. In pharmaceuticals, strict rules apply to stability. This nasal spray must also be tested against the injection; we have to demonstrate that both versions are equivalent. We are at an advanced stage.
Diuretic nasal spray
The other is a diuretic nasal spray—essentially a water pill in the form of a nasal spray—which he is developing together with Vincent van Driel, a cardiologist friend affiliated with the Haga Hospital in Zoetermeer. In people with heart failure, the heart no longer pumps as strongly, resulting in insufficient pressure on the kidneys and causing the body to gradually retain fluid. Calves swell, and so on. This can be treated with a diuretic pill—until they get a severe flu or an infection. Then that pill is no longer properly absorbed. Moreover, the diuretic pill is not always taken as carefully, Pellikaan notes. If people need to go out, they sometimes postpone taking it. After taking such a pill, you have to, to put it bluntly, urinate like a racehorse. Or they take too much at once when they are at home, resulting in dehydration or imbalance. Once that process spirals out of control, it is often irreversible. They then have to go to the hospital to get rid of the excess fluid. This is burdensome both for the patient—often someone over 70—and for their loved ones. It takes six to ten days for all that excess fluid, often more than 12 liters, to disappear.
Not a drugstore product
That diuretic nasal spray will prevent a lot of suffering, he predicts, because it works more effectively and faster, thereby preventing hospital admissions. “In the Netherlands, you’re talking about 35,000 hospital admissions for heart failure each year, of which 28,000 patients return because they retain fluid again.” Within five years, Pellikaan and Van Driel hope to have the diuretic nasal spray on the market. It will only be available by prescription; logically, it is not a drugstore product.
That won’t mark the end of Pellikaan’s life as an inventor. “In five years, I might spend a bit more time on longer trips abroad and renovating my house. I genuinely think inventing is the most enjoyable thing there is. Between my fiftieth and sixtieth, I realized that developing products is my mission in life. I had already been doing it before—don’t hold me to it, but I believe I’ve been a member of the NOVU since 1994—but not as consciously as I am now. I do have the patience for endless experimentation that an inventor needs.”
Moonwatch
His very first clear invention dates back 29 years. It was a kind of hydraulic automatic shock absorber for motorcycles. With this shock absorber, you could, so to speak, drive over a speed bump at 170 kilometers per hour without the rider noticing much of it. “I wasn’t able to commercialize it. Nobody understood it. Years later, Sachs AG from Switzerland developed the same system for trucks. So I wasn’t just talking nonsense.”
As a side activity, he designs watches—“between 20 and 100 per year. That started after my favorite watch had to be repaired, and that repair took two years. It was an Omega Speedmaster, the first watch on the moon. My wife encouraged me to buy a new beautiful watch, but I couldn’t find one. So I started sketching watch hands on the train myself. Under the name Pellikaan Timing, I design watches using Swiss movements.”
“I don’t make as much impact with my watches as I do with, for example, Forwarts, that wart remover in an aerosol for home use, which has been on the market since 2018–2019 after seven years of development. With Forwarts—the European name, as the product is not called the same everywhere—you spray directly onto the wart, making it much colder and therefore freezing it more effectively. Forwarts reaches minus 40 to minus 45 degrees. Nearly 2 million units have now been sold worldwide.”