Identifying cross-disciplinary pathways to translational science

美国国立卫生研究院路线图特别强调加速“从实验室到床边”的研究，或将基础科学研究“转化”为实际临床应用，这在今天通常需要20多年才能实现。美国国立卫生研究院每年在临床和转化科学奖（CTSA）项目上花费近5亿美元，这只是为发展支持转化科学的国家基础设施而进行大量投资的一个例子。然而，跟踪这些重大政策变化的影响是具有挑战性的，因为尽管转化科学已经以许多不同的方式进行了描述，包括经常使用的定性T1-T4分类，但尚未就精确的定义达成共识。由于这个原因，也很难确定转化科学，了解它是如何发生的，并确定哪些研究人员正在进行转化科学。这个项目解决了这个问题，通过建立一个最近发展的定量和可视化的方法来测量翻译，称为生物医学三角形，它将生物医学期刊文章映射到一个三角形，其角代表与动物，细胞和分子以及人类有关的研究。文章在图上的位置基于其主题，翻译被定义为文章集合或引用这些文章的文章向人类角落的移动。这提供了一种方法来确定单个科学家、组织、资助机构或科学领域产生对人类健康有潜在影响的结果的程度，并计算所需的时间。该项目将这个生物医学三角形扩展到另一个维度，形成一个翻译金字塔，其顶点代表生命和健康科学以外领域的出版物，包括物理科学、社会科学、艺术和人文科学。这使研究人员能够(1)识别引用路径（一篇文章引用另一篇文章）和交叉进出生物医学的个体研究人员，(2)计算这些路径相交的最短路径导致临床研究的频率，为导致翻译的机制提供前所未有的洞察力。更广泛的影响本项目帮助决策者确定生物医学以外的研究通过跨学科的知识传播对人类健康的影响程度。它不仅为他们提供了一种工具，以评估在转化科学方面的现有投资，而且还确定了通往新疗法的非传统途径。更一般地说，这个项目展示了一种技术，用于发现不同研究领域的交叉点，并衡量跨学科团队在创新中的作用。它通过对数以百万计的出版物进行精确的定量分析来实现这些，但它以简单的数据可视化的形式呈现结果，科学家和公众都能理解。

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 MeritThis 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 ImpactsThis 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.