Top 10 Medical Research Trends to Watch in 2013

A Great stroke association would already be focused on solving these.
Where the hell is it?
Top 10 Medical Research Trends to Watch in 2013
Three of the trends to highlight.
8. The other translation gap: Turning outputs into outcomes. 

FasterCures has spent a lot of time focusing on the "first translation gap," between basic scientific discoveries and research in humans subjects; somewhat outside our scope has been "T2," the gap between approval of a treatment and its adoption into widespread use to improve patient outcomes, which can take as long as the R&D process. Many others have analyzed this problem, but the ImproveCareNow network has gone from analysis to action, creating a rapid learning system that is speeding the adoption of evidence-based care practices for kids with Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis at almost 50 care centers across the country and improving their health dramatically. The Kauffman Foundation is working to scale and replicate their success through its Health Network Trust initiative. We hope 2013 will see this model launched in other disease areas.

9. Collaboration: Writing the playbook. 

There now seems to be broad acceptance of the idea that collaboration among R&D stakeholders (government, academia, industry, nonprofits(Where are the patients?)) is required if we are going to make progress in an increasingly complex scientific and business environment. There are many experiments in collaboration going on, and many successful outcomes that can be highlighted. It is time for more systematic analysis of what's working and what's not. While these efforts vary widely depending on the goals and the collaborators, can we draw some common lessons about, for example, what are fertile areas for collaboration, what one should look for in partners, what are the pitfalls to avoid? After all, as Luke Timmerman of Xconomy wrote recently, what we're after isn't collaboration for its own sake, it's a "creative rethinking of the biomedical R&D continuum," and "while those [collaborative] efforts are encouraging, this really should be a national conversation that involves a whole lot more players." Will 2013 be the year we start trying to know what we know, and perhaps even start redrawing that linear R&D pipeline we all know so well?

10. Innovation: Who's outside the box (you tell us). 

While there's no shortage of brilliant scientists and discoveries in medical research, it can be notoriously hard to move them forward in the expensive environments of academia and industry, where risk is not necessarily rewarded. We are seeing more efforts to try to bust out of this box in ways that are more common in other fields. Philanthropist Peter Thiel, who started out by giving young people $100,000 to skip college and work on their ideas, has established Breakout Labs to fund early-stage companies with radical ideas. The National Institutes of Health is getting into the action with its "skip the post-doc" Early Independence Awards to help free exceptional young minds from the academic treadmill. Jimmy Lin's Rare Genomics Institute is crowdfunding genomic sequencing for patients with rare diseases -- and there's much discussion about crowdfunding's utility in life sciences. Crowdsourcing is gaining traction in life sciences, from FoldIt's online protein folding games to Transparency Life Sciences' crowdsourced clinical study design. Who will be redefining "the box" in 2013? You tell us -- send us your ideas at info@fastercures.org.