Hi,
You say destroying an IC.
Can you give us
* a photo of the circuit
* the schematic
* a more detailed failure description
* the exact type of IC
There are different tyoe of pulses.
* low energy, high voltage. Like ESD. They may be suppressed by capacitors
* high energy ones. With these you have to limit the current with one device, while limiting the voltage with another device.
Bot devices need to react very fast, thus a PTC is not suitable.
It depends a lot on your applications what protection circuit to use.
Klaus