Identifying cross-disciplinary pathways to translational science

确定转化科学的跨学科途径

• 批准号: 1360042
• 负责人: Griffin Weber
• 金额: $ 49.99万
• 依托单位: Harvard University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-05-01 至 2018-04-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1360042&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Identifying; cross; disciplinary; pathways; translational

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.

美国国立卫生研究院路线图特别强调加快“从床到床”的研究，也就是将基础科学研究“转化”为实际的临床应用，这在今天通常需要20多年的时间。美国国立卫生研究院每年在其临床和翻译科学奖(CTSA)项目上花费近5亿美元，这只是为发展支持翻译科学的国家基础设施而进行的巨额投资的一个例子。然而，跟踪这些重大政策变化的影响是具有挑战性的，因为尽管对翻译科学的描述有许多不同的方式，包括经常使用的定性T1-T4分类，但尚未就准确的定义达成共识。出于这个原因，也很难确定翻译科学，理解它是如何发生的，并确定哪些研究人员正在进行这项工作。智力价值这个项目通过建立在最近开发的被称为生物医学三角的量化和视觉翻译方法的基础上解决了这个问题，该方法将生物医学期刊上的文章映射到一个三角形，三角形的角落代表与动物、细胞和分子以及人类相关的研究。文章在图表中的位置取决于文章的主题，翻译被定义为一组文章，或引用这些文章的文章，向人类的角落移动。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在多大程度上产生了对人类健康有潜在影响的结果，并计算了所需的时间。该项目将这个生物医学三角扩展到另一个维度，形成了一个翻译金字塔，其顶端代表了生命和健康科学以外的领域的出版物，包括自然科学、社会科学以及艺术和人文科学。这使研究人员能够(1)确定引用路径(一篇文章引用另一篇文章)和个别研究人员交叉进入和离开生物医学，以及(2)计算这些路径与导致临床研究的最短路径相交的频率，使人们对导致翻译的机制有前所未有的洞察力。广泛影响该项目帮助决策者确定生物医学以外的研究通过跨学科知识传播对人类健康的影响程度。它为他们提供了一种工具，不仅可以评估在翻译科学方面的现有投资，还可以确定通向新疗法的非传统途径。更广泛地说，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方面的作用。它通过对数以百万计的出版物进行精确的量化分析来完成这些工作，但它将结果以简单的数据可视化形式呈现出来，科学家和普通公众都可以理解。