Challenges
Challenges Within the Traditional Research System
At the FasterCures Summit on Innovation in Disease Research, participants discussed the limits of traditional research and the need to move their research in a different direction. They identified several key issues affecting progress in the traditional research system:
Infrastructure
- Institutional resistance within NIH and academia to changing infrastructure and rewards systems – in areas such as publication, tenure, grants, and intellectual property – to promote collaboration and innovation
- Lack of institutionalized communication and data exchange between basic and clinical researchers
- Inadequate opportunities for cross-disciplinary training and practice.
Research environment
- Reductionist approach to scientific inquiry
- Little encouragement or reward for high-risk research
- Focus on individual organizational challenges instead of collaborative approaches to "big picture" problems
- Increasing conflict-of-interest challenges arising in public-private partnerships
- Lack of public understanding of the challenges facing the disease research endeavor
- Insufficient focus on translating basic research into clinical application
- Inadequate dissemination of previous research efforts – especially failures
- Failure to aggregate funding across organizational lines to achieve larger scale impacts
