The available medications had to be given intravenously. Because they couldn't eliminate the acid completely, there was no way to stop the active bleeding: Patients needed more effective stomach-acid reducing medications, namely proton-pump inhibitors such as Prilosec. But these couldn't be administered to those in intensive care because they were packaged in capsules that patients weren't able to swallow.

Simply emptying the contents of the capsules into an IV didn't work either. All proton-pump inhibitors at that time had an enteric coating to keep them from being destroyed by acid in the stomach. The coated granules of medication within each capsule were designed to dissolve in the intestines. But the granules, it turns out, were virtually impossible to get through the feeding tubes ICU patients require.

Even if they did make their way down, the drugs acted too slowly to offer patients much relief. That's because acid-inhibiting drugs work by switching off the proton pumps that produce stomach acid. Since only some of the proton pumps are switched on at any given time, usually when a patient is eating, the drug may take several days to shut all the pumps down. "When you're critically ill, you don't have many pumps on because you're not eating," Phillips says.

The solution, Phillips discovered, was to grind up the granules, mix the powder with sodium bicarbonate to supply the buffer, add water and inject the solution into an ICU patient's feeding tube.

"The drug dramatically -- much more than I anticipated -- controlled the pH and had a lasting effect," Phillips says. Not only did the acid-neutralizing sodium bicarbonate provide instant relief, but it had a second synergistic effect as well. It turned on all the proton pumps, so that the proton pump inhibitor was able to shut them all down immediately. This meant the drug could be useful to more than just critically ill patients; anyone who is prescribed a proton-pump inhibitor could benefit.

Phillips and his colleagues tried the combination on their worst-case patients and got amazing results. "We saw wonderful things in the ICU," says Phillips.

Then came the hardest part: the 10-year effort to bring this invention to market. "Ten years and it seems like 110. It was terrible, horrible," Phillips says. He jokes that he nearly developed a stress ulcer of his own.

At that time, MU's budget for patenting inventions was miniscule. Phillips had to go to his department chair, Donald Silver, for the $200,000 in attorney's fees. "He had seen [the drug combination] in action and said this was life-saving stuff," Phillips recalls.

Next came the daunting task of interesting a pharmaceutical company in his new invention. Phillips learned the hard way that the biggest of these corporations are often more interested in protecting their own products than in taking a chance on an offer from an outsider. The industry attitude, Phillips says, was "Oh, that's NIH -- Not Invented Here."