Identifying cross-disciplinary pathways to translational science

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

The National Institutes of Health Roadmap places special emphasis on accelerating "bench-to-bedside" research, or the "translation" of basic science research into practical clinical applications, which today typically takes more than 20 years to occur. The nearly $500 million the NIH spends annually on its Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) program is just one example of the large investments being made to develop a national infrastructure to support translational science. However, tracking the impact of these major policy changes is challenging because although translational science has been described in many different ways, including the frequently used qualitative T1-T4 classification, consensus on a precise definition has not yet been reached. For this reason, it has also been difficult to identify translational science, understand how it occurs, and determine which researchers are conducting it. Intellectual Merit This project addresses this problem by building on a recently developed quantitative and visual approach for measuring translation called the Triangle of Biomedicine, which maps biomedical journal articles to a triangle, whose corners represent research related to animals, cells and molecules, and humans. The position of an article on the graph is based on its topics, and translation is defined as movement of a collection of articles, or the articles that cite those articles, towards the human corner. This provides a way of determining the degree to which an individual scientist, organization, funding agency, or scientific field is producing results that have potential impact on human health, and calculating the amount of time it takes. This project extends this Triangle of Biomedicine to another dimension to form a Pyramid of Translation, whose apex represents publications in fields outside of the life and health sciences, including the physical sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities. This enables researchers to (1) identify citation pathways (one article citing another) and individual researchers that cross in and out of biomedicine, and (2) calculate the frequency that these intersect the shortest paths leading to clinical investigation, giving unprecedented insight to the mechanisms that lead to translation. Broader Impacts This project helps policy makers determine the extent to which research outside of biomedicine impacts human health through cross-disciplinary diffusion of knowledge. It gives them a tool not only to evaluate existing investments in translational science, but also to identify non-traditional pathways towards novel therapeutics. More generally, this project demonstrates a technique for discovering where different research domains intersect and measuring the role of cross-disciplinary teams on innovation. It does these using precise quantitative analyses of millions of publications, yet it presents the results in simple data visualizations, which can be understood by both scientists and the general public.