Philip Morris research on precursors to the modern e-cigarette since 1990

Correspondence to Professor Stanton A Glantz, Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, Room 366 Library, 530 Parnassus, University of California, San Francisco, CA 94143-1390, USA; [email protected]

Introduction

Electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes or electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS)) have been promoted as a healthier alternative to cigarettes because they deliver nicotine aerosol without burning tobacco.¹ The invention of the e-cigarette is often credited to Chinese pharmacist Hon Lik in 2003^2–4 and considered a ‘disruptive technology’ that could compete with cigarettes.^5–7

Since at least 1963, cigarette companies have been working on ENDS that did not burn tobacco in an effort to develop ‘reduced harm’ or ‘socially acceptable’ cigarette alternatives,^{8 9} including products that heated tobacco instead of burning it, such as British American Tobacco's (BAT) 1960s Ariel cigarette,¹⁰ RJ Reynolds' (RJR) 1980s Premier,¹¹ RJR's 1990s Eclipse¹² and Philip Morris' (PM's) 1990s/2000s Accord.⁹ None of these products heated a liquid nicotine solution, so they bore little resemblance to modern e-cigarettes, and none achieved commercial success. In 2013, NuMark, a PM subsidiary, released the MarkTen e-cigarette based on nicotine aerosol technology that PM had been developing since 1990, 13 years before Hon Lik developed his e-cigarette.

Methods

Between October 2010 and October 2015, we searched the University of California, San Francisco Truth (formerly Legacy) Tobacco Documents Library (http://industrydocuments.library.ucsf.edu/tobacco) beginning with ‘electric cigarette’, ‘electronic cigarettes’, ‘e-cigarette’, ‘smokeless cigarettes’, ‘nicotine aerosol’, ‘tobacco aerosol’ and ‘vaping’. We applied standard snowball sampling techniques¹³ to refine subsequent searches, which revealed that PM, RJR and BAT all attempted to create reduced risk cigarettes and cigarette alternatives. This paper focuses on PM because only PM documents described a device resembling the modern e-cigarette. We identified several PM projects that we used as search terms, including ‘Ideal Smoke’, ‘Project Leap’ (a component of the Ideal Smoke programme), ‘Project Beta’ (a subproject of Project Leap), ‘Tobacco Aerosol Research Project’ (TARP) and ‘Vision Technologies’. These searches revealed that PM used a capillary aerosol generator (CAG) to develop a nicotine aerosol device and a pharmaceutical drug delivery device. Searches for ‘capillary aerosol generator’ and ‘aerosol generator’ yielded additional documents. We then searched using product names including Accord, an electrically heated cigarette sold by PM in the late 1990s, Aria (a pharmaceutical...