Bench Press

We’ve commented before about the ability of telemedicine solutions to bring cutting edge technology and quality of care to emerging economies. One example is some of the recent work that the Camera Culture Group from MIT’s Media Lab has done by building a clever optometry solution into an accessory and an application for Android-powered smartphones (HT: Engadget).

The concept is very cool. Many optometrists today use autorefractors, machines which scans the images formed on the back of a patient’s retina to get a rough, but automated, measure on the quality of your vision. Optometrists will then use phoropters to get to a precise enough measure of your eyes as to be able to prescribe lenses for contacts/glasses.

The problem with this approach is that autorefractors and phoropters are too expensive and too time consuming for widespread use in many places around the world. The NETRA solution that the Camera Culture Group came up with was to build an accessory and an application which force a user to make a pair of lines overlap using controls on the phone. Doing this repeatedly lets the application do a calculation similar to what is done by an autorefractor to calculate the quality of the user’s vision in a process which is much faster (several minutes) and cheaper than a standard eye exam (more details in the video and images below)

The project website shows a very compelling table which compares the relative prices and accuracies of optometry solutions in existence today.

It’ll be interesting to see where this technology can go once displays similar to Apple’s Retina Display become cheaper and more prevalent. This example definitely shows the power of telemedicine approaches and is hopefully a harbinger for more equally compelling and innovative solutions for the needs of scientists and doctors around the world.

(Images and video from NETRA website)

A recent NBER paper (gated) by Benjamin Jones from Northwestern conducts a systematic review of trends in scientific research and made a couple of conclusions that won’t come as a surprise to anyone in science (HT: Inside Higher Ed):

As science advances and knowledge accumulates, ensuing generations of innovators spend longer in training and become more narrowly expert, shifting key innovations (i) later in the life cycle and (ii) from solo researchers toward teams

As evidence to this, the average age at which a scientist made a discovery which later qualified for a Nobel prize has increased by 6 years over the course of the 20th century. When looking at publications, the researchers found that the average author list on a publication grew, on average, by 15-20% per decade!

We’ve discussed before the “decline of the Lone Ranger model of science”, but Jones’ paper focuses on looking at the policy implications for such a change. He concludes that the government (and, probably, the academic and private institutions which support researchers) need to adapt policy to reflect this new reality by:

• Tailoring funding and messaging to help keep young researchers interested despite the longer and more difficult training period
• Finding new ways to evaluate the worthiness of proposals as scientist’s expertise becomes more and more specialized
• Altering incentive structures as the team of collaborators replaces the Lone Ranger scientist model of discovery

These policy suggestions are definitely good ones, and are certainly necessary to adapt to a new scientific environment, but one dimension of this which Jones doesn’t discuss as much are the technological (the focus of this blog!) innovations which can help further research in this brave new world.

• Improving science communication with the public. We’ve made multiple mentions of this in the past, but they are no less true here. Active public communications management not only helps secure funding and raise public awareness of the good scientists can do, but it also helps attract the interest of future generations of researchers and policymakers.
• Embracing new collaboration tools. To really kick-start collaboration between scientists across geographies and specialties, we need tools that go beyond just email and fax machines. Tools like Google Wave, wikis, distributed version control, and social media forums like Friendfeed are an early taste of the sort of live collaboration that new web technology can bring about.
• Leveraging cloud computing and heterogeneous compute. One of the reasons discoveries are taking longer and are more expensive is that there is so much more data to collect and to analyze than before. One technological innovation which we’ve talked about at lengths here is the ability of graphics cards/GPUs to make supercomputer-level processing power more readily accessible to research labs. Another is the use of new cloud computing services like Amazon’s to rapidly increase the computational resources that a lab/company has access to. Neither are panaceas for all the data analysis issues which scientists face, but they are definitely ways to make things easier for research groups who have stringent IT budgets.
• Using crowdsourcing to speed innovation. Who says research has to take longer and be more expensive? Perhaps its time to pull on new technological levers which let scientists borrow on the resources and brains of a wider group of people. While new platforms like ChemBioConnect, distributed computing systems like Folding@Home, and volunteer crowdsourcing initiatives like Fold.IT are far from perfect, they hint at a future where researchers can call on resources beyond what their personal computers and brains are capable of.
• Building new research attribution models. When I say new attribution models, I’m referring to two things. The first is embodied by new standards like ORCID which make it easier to understand which person is the author/researcher in question (something which will become more and more important as more people with the same initials/names enter the sciences). The second, and more substantive, is finding new ways to understand who contributed what to a particular study. In today’s digital age, I find it laughable that we still rely on simple author list order to determine the relative roles and positions of the researchers listed on a publication. Employing metadata and other graphical cues can help scientists achieve the recognition they deserve, as well as provide appropriate incentives for teams of researchers to contribute.
• Contributing negative and after-publication results to open repository. While I can understand the hesitation for most research groups to pursue a pure open access strategy, those concerns should not hold with negative or post-publication experimental data. While opening up access to data from failed/negative experiments does little to hurt a lab’s ability to publish first, it can be a dramatic boon for other research groups (especially new labs or labs with interdisciplinary focuses) who can not only use the data for their own analyses and experimental designs, but avoid committing resources to experiments which have already been conducted. If it can work for biotechs and pharma companies, then there’s no reason it should be any different for non-commercial groups.

These suggestions only scratch the surface of what new technologies and policies can do to help scientists in a world where scientific training takes longer and where scientific discoveries need to be more collaborative. If anyone else has any other suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments!

One of the best ways for scientists to reach out to the general public is through video. This past Friday, I got a chance to experience this firsthand at the IMAX theater at Boston’s New England Aquarium. A while back, I had caught the trailer for Hubble 3D at an IMAX movie and, given my love for all things Hubble, I had wanted to catch a showing. Seeing that the Hubble special was only ~40 minutes long, I decided to also buy a ticket for Under the Sea 3D as well.

And, as my Tweets that day pointed out, I was blown away:

There are some today who think high-def/3D is usually a gimmick by movie studios and digital display sellers, but that was definitely not true for either of these films. The 3D really enhanced the impact of the visuals. It let the audience, many of whom are unlikely to ever conduct spacewalks or scuba-dive where the Under the Sea 3D crew went to really feel what it was like to see undersea life. And, in the case of some of the deep space Hubble 3D shots, it gave the audience a very cool new look at objects so far away that its almost inconceivable that human beings will ever actually get to visit them.

Couple that with strong performances on interesting material by Leonardo DiCaprio in Hubble 3D and Jim Carrey in Under the Sea 3D and you get a strong combination which, if I’m any judge, not only gives the audience a juicy taste of why science is cool, but why its important to continue to study it.

I have definitely been sold on these, and I not only plan to check out more of these as they come out (I’ve got my eye on Sea Rex 3D), but would recommend this to anyone who has an hour to spend or would like to check out a visually stunning way to learn something new.

We’ve posted before on the Federation of American Scientist’s Immune Attack computer game as a great example of the use of games in science education. But, science “edutainment” isn’t limited just to computer games. Fans of Wizard’s Magic the Gathering and Konami’s Yu-Gi-Oh trading card games will immediately recognize The Healing Blade, a trading card game designed in the spirit of Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh but designed around the battle between antibiotics and bacteria (HT: AMEDNEWS)

The game was designed by two self-admitted “mega-geek” physicians, Dr. Arun Mathews and Dr. Francis Kong, who met in medical school and created the company Nerdcore Learning to promote The Healing Blade and other medicine-related “edutainment” paraphernalia. As to why they created the concept, Dr. Mathews notes:

I was struck upon the complexity and yet innate nature of gaming within the choice I would make for putting some of my sick patients on particular antibiotics … Essentially, in a similar way, when you are playing a complex multi-tiered video game, we are making similar choices by obtaining data from our cultures [and] making risk-management decisions.

Truer words were never spoken.

Amazingly, while Mathews and Kong had only intended to bring 30 copies of the game to launch at the American Medical Students Association annual meeting, a printing error turned that into over 100 copies, 90% of which sold! Mathews describes the sight:

We had this gaggle of students just sitting down, spreading out on a bunch of tables, all playing the game. That is one memory that will take a while to fade, because it was such a neat thing to see students getting super excited about infectious disease and therapies.

As an unabashed former-Magic-and-Yu-gi-oh player, I can definitely see the appeal. There is something very compelling about the mix of chance and strategy in trading card gameplay. Sadly, at the time of the writing of this blog post, The Healing Blade’s online purchase form shows that the game is sold out. So, in the meantime, I will have to leave you with some pictures of some very nice-looking game card art:

(Images and video from Healing Blade website)

Despite all the cool and meaningful innovations we’ve discussed on this blog, few come as close in terms of impact on a scientific field as the Hubble Space Telescope. And this weekend, you can help celebrate it’s birthday!

Officially launched on April 24, 1990 (can you believe that was 20 years ago!?), it has provided one of humanity’s best looks into deep space and has, among other things:

• Helped refine the field’s understanding of Hubble’s Law and the Hubble Constant
• Showed that the expansion of the universe was not decelerating, but accelerating, suggesting the existence of dark energy
• Helped to establish the existence of massive black holes at the center of galaxies and their relationships
• Provided sharp images of the impact of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 into Jupiter
• Collect data on extrasolar planets and protoplanetary discs
• Furthered the study of Wolf-Rayet Stars, suspected to be the precursors of Gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful energy bursts known in the universe
• The mindblowing look 13 billion years into the past known as the Hubble Deep Field

And, potentially, most important of all: the gorgeous pictures of deep space (from Space Telescope Science Institute’s HubbleSite website).

Happy 20th birthday, Hubble!

(Image credits – Hubble Site via Space Telescope Science Institute)

Here at Bench Press we’re always interested in new initiatives that harness the advantages of the internet. We’ve covered various powerful distributive computing initiatives as well as breakthrough collaborative endeavors in scientific research. So I was intrigued when I saw buzz on Twitter about the Obama administration’s attempt to crowd source suggestions for scientific policy.

Through the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and associated non-profit Expert Labs, the Obama administration wants to hear what grand challenges scientists envision taking on.

Expert Labs has a nice video explaining the reasoning behind this grand experiment in policy crowd sourcing.

After a quick search on Twitter I’m a bit curious as to how Expert Labs plans to parse all the data they’re going to get from this call to arms, but I’m optimistic that some interesting insights can be gleaned as to the opinions of Americans on the directions science should be headed in. More data never hurt right? If you’re interested in submitting an idea follow the directions here, you’ve got until April 15th!

We posted before about the rhymes of Stanford University biologist Tom McFadden who creates very inspired raps about science to help his undergraduate students prepare for exams. A friend of mine showed me one of his latest creations, a remake of Fifty Cent and The Game’s song Hate It or Love It about metabolism.

What especially caught my eye, however, was another video in McFadden’s collection: “Clouds Make it Rain”. It’s a re-make of the Fat Joe song “Make it Rain”, but what made it special was that instead of the usual undergraduate-level “flow”, this was focused on and starred a classroom of fifth graders! According to the YouTube caption, McFadden worked with a classroom at East Palo Alto Chartered School with a program of field trips, lab experiments, and short presentations to study the water cycle and its impact on insect life.

East Palo Alto is notorious for being a difficult neighborhood, especially for children. This project’s use of hip hop and other integrated learning experiences strikes me as an ideal way to better connect science to the children’s lives and to make the learning more fun and memorable. Judging from the quality of the music video and the enthusiasm of the kids in it, I think this counts as a strong success.

Well done!

A few weeks ago, we posted a number of reasons why we believe the Pharmaceutical industry needs to pursue greater openness to accelerate innovation and reduce the cost and time of drug development. A few weeks after that, almost as if by magic, pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline made a very encouraging announcement which is hopefully a first step in the direction of openness and a promising boost to global health initiatives around the world working on Malaria:

GSK has screened its pharmaceutical compound library of more than 2 million molecules for any that may inhibit the malaria parasite P.falciparum, the deadliest form of malaria, which is found primarily in sub-Saharan Africa. This exercise took five scientists a year to complete, and has yielded more than 13,500 compounds that could lead to the development of new and innovative treatments for malaria, which kills at least one million children every year in Africa.

GSK will make these findings, including the chemical structures and associated assay data, freely available to the public via leading scientific websites. The release of these data will mark the first time that a pharmaceutical company has made public the structures of so many of its compounds in the hope that they could lead to new medicines for malaria.

Building upon its commitments to create a “knowledge pool” for neglected tropical diseases, GSK
today announced that governance of the “knowledge pool” will be taken over by an independent third party, BIO Ventures for Global Health (BVGH). GSK and BVGH have also signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Emory Institute for Drug Discovery (EIDD) to join the pool and further open up knowledge, chemical libraries, and other assets in the search for new medicines for neglected tropical diseases. A second collaboration has also been established with South Africa firm iThemba Pharmaceuticals. This work will help research and discovery into new medicines to treat tuberculosis.

In addition to opening up its library of malaria hits to the public and creating a third-party administered “knowledge pool”, GSK is even promising to give 60 scientists access to its advanced facilities in Spain and a funding pool of $8 million to help fund malaria research.

While GSK is reaping (well-deserved) kudo’s for this, we believe (perhaps, more correctly, hope) that GSK is also using this to figure out if greater openness can help their underlying business and how best to do it. As a Nature editorial on the subject opines:

The move advances the pharmaceutical industry’s slow but steady shift towards more open sharing of data. At least for early-stage, precompetitive research, drug companies are finding it useful to lower the firewalls around their intellectual property and pool their resources. Making data public brings fresh eyes and minds to the problem, and has the potential to accelerate the discovery process.

Let’s hope this marks the beginning of a very productive move towards greater information sharing.

(GSK Press Release) (Image credit) (Nature editorial)

We have always sought out new frontiers and this generation is no different. Today’s frontiers can’t be found on a map. They’re being explored in our classrooms and our laboratories, in our start-ups and our factories. And today’s pioneers are not traveling to some far flung place. These pioneers are all around us — the entrepreneurs and the inventors, the researchers, the engineers — helping to lead us into the future, just as they have in the past. This is the nation that has led the world for two centuries in the pursuit of discovery.

-President Barack Obama,  Energy Speech at MIT October 23, 2009

As a candidate for President and throughout President Obama’s first year he has established himself as a friend of the scientific community. He has made many statements like the one above poignantly establishing the importance of innovation and scientific discovery in our nation’s goals. However, supportive statements don’t pay the bills and as I’ve had reiterated to me several times during my conversations with various professors at graduate school interviews; funding is king. Ultimately, the best way for President Obama to demonstrate his support of the sciences is to show us the money. He started off on the right foot with the science funding handed out in the stimulus package last year. The chart below illustrates President Obama’s proposed budgetary changes.

Minus the small decrease in funding for the CDC, many scientific organizations could potentially see sizable increases in funding. As I’ll be starting my graduate work in biosciences next fall I’m extremely happy to see the proposed increases. I’m quite surprised to see a reduction in funds budgeted to the CDC after the recent swine flu outbreak. However, the overall increase in funding is a huge step forward compared to the prior administration. Hopefully Congress will pass a budget with increases similar to the President’s proposed budget. These funds could be used to improve the financial status of many labs across the country that were affected by declining funding availability. I’ve got my fingers crossed that President Obama will continue supporting the sciences in not just his speeches but in his actions as well.

(Chart – Wired.com)

The Open Science movement is driven by the idea that collaboration and openness are good for innovation and discovery. After all, the logic goes, who is more likely to discover a cure for cancer: five research groups with different sets of skills and specializations who don’t share any information with one another, or five identical groups who actively pool their knowledge?

Ironically, that reasoning seems to have completely skipped over the biotech/pharmaceutical industry who seem intent on pursuing the “divided we fall” approach despite the escalating costs of drug development. The application of openness itself is especially relevant here, as a significant piece of the $800 million – $1.2 billion price tag that goes with bringing one drug to market is the cost of failed R&D projects.

This problem is one that is not only a burden on the shareholders and executives at these companies, but also a burden on the healthcare systems of people around the world, which end up paying more and waiting longer for drugs to make it through a company’s pipeline.

About a month ago, the New York Times cast a spotlight on this problem:

Although many companies have committed to publishing the results of clinical trials, whether or not they succeed, drug makers don’t typically publish information about projects that fail at an earlier stage. A result is that companies waste many millions going down experimental paths that their competitors have already found to be dead ends.

M.I.T. is proposing dead-end drug disclosure, a concept that goes by a euphemistic mouthful: “precompetitive information sharing.”

Drug makers may realize that the financial and medical value of sharing such information outweighs the competitive risk, said Dr. Gigi Hirsch, the executive director of the M.I.T. Center for Biomedical Innovation, the locus of the drug project. “There should be more information available about failed compounds in the interest of the greater good,” Dr. Hirsch said.

The traditional response from the pharmaceutical industry is one that is familiar to Open advocates – that intellectual property and proprietary platforms are necessary for the returns which drive investment in these spaces. But, this ignores two things.

First, the act of sharing information on failed assay hits helps to reduce the cost and time of development. The decision to invest in a particular R&D project is driven by returns, and returns are driven by development costs and the time it takes to get “money back”. While being more open about internal failures and successes will do little to change the cost of marketing, clinical trials, and many aspects of development, it will reduce a large portion of the time and cost of initial R&D (because of the wider availability of information) and the cost of failure (as there would be no need to pursue avenues of research on paths that have already been deemed a failure). So even if the prices and number of drugs sold diminish slightly due to the inability of a company to hold on to some early-stage proprietary advantage or the release of some of the details on their compound library, the time to market and cost of development diminish as well, helping to preserve the return on investment necessary to provide for the level of drug innovation and discovery that patients and doctors want.

Secondly, a move to openness does not necessitate unprofitability. It wouldn’t be realistic to ask companies to pursue a path which destroys the shareholder value they’ve been entrusted to protect. But, the fact that technology companies like Google and Nokia have been able to push open standards and open source yet retain profitability and innovation should hopefully signal to bio/pharmaceutical companies that it is possible to have both shareholder value and openness.

The path to profitable openness that technology industry practitioners like Google pursue is no different than the path that any company pursues: specialization. Google, for example, has specialized on high quality search results, effective advertisement targeting, and IT infrastructure management. As a result, there’s no reason for Google to prevent the broader technology industry from having access to the source code for its Chrome web browser, Android mobile operating system, or Google’s rich APIs to access the information you can find on its websites. In fact, Google seems to have understood that keeping its information closed would reduce innovation on the web, which would in the long-run hurt its own growth and profitability prospects.

I’d humbly wager that the value of protecting early stage failure and platform information is relatively minor in the grand scheme of pharmaceutical company value (and in fact some companies do publish failures, albeit only years after the experiment). I’d even humbly bet that major drug companies probably have much more significant expertise and differentiation in the steps after initial R&D, such as in compound refinement, clinical trials operation, process development, and computational analysis, etc. All of this should, at the minimum, shield existing drug companies from the “risks” of opening up on early-stage R&D failures and could even help existing drug companies compete by emphasizing these new capabilities as the determinants of success.

Nobody is saying that this path will magically materialize and produce awe-inspiring levels of profitability and growth overnight. But, when an industry is on the edge of a patent cliff (most blockbuster drugs are expected to become generic in the next couple of years), when its primary source of “value creation” seems to be in buying smaller companies, and when nations around the world are struggling with healthcare costs, I’d assert that the bio/pharmaceutical industry needs to change its practices.

As for how – I would propose the following compromise.

1. First, the NIH, PhRMA, or some other neutral authority should define a set of standards for what information should be contributed (balancing the desire to foster innovation through openness and the desire for companies to maintain the closedness they need to build proprietary advantages along other dimensions), create a standard for secure information sharing (which protects any individuals and patients and proprietary pipeline-related information) and govern compliance.
2. This body should then set up an information exchange/database for participating companies, academic institutions, government research centers, and medical institutions to share information and prevent non-compliant companies from gaining access (it’s not a perfect solution, but it could help assure companies who are worried that they will give up all of their information but not receive any in return).

This road would likely be a long and difficult one, but given the stakes and the potential benefits, I think it is one well worth taking.

(Image credit) (Image credit)