“You should spend more time thinking about the clinical significance of your project.” – a comment I received while presenting my research proposal. Finding relevance to your research is great for getting funding, but if money isn’t a concern then maybe conduct more exploratory research:
A study from 2018 found that many impactful medication (80% of the “27 most transformative medicines”) rooted from basic research[1]. (They defined basic research as studies that were conducted where a biomedical application was not obvious at the time.) While this report corroborates with other studies, they all also agree that decades may pass before a drug becomes publicly available.
Similarly, transformative techniques can stem from exploratory research. Examples include CRISPR-cas9 (a system used by bacteria to resist viral infections that’s now used by researchers to modify genes) and optogenetics (expressing ion channels that bacteria use to sense light in other cells to make them activate with light).
Unfortunately, there is a discrepancy between lack of funding and increasing evidence of the payoff that comes from exploratory research. Federal funding agencies seem to now prefer projects with an immediate beneficial effect; National Science Foundation, NSF, has reported that the US government has tapered or even declined in their exploratory research funding and the percent of basic research being federally funded has begun to decrease [2]. Lucky, private sectors are picking up some of the slack…
Anyway, what I’m currently working on may not have an obvious clinical application, but it’s an exciting topic that should have been explored decades ago! If anything, it’ll at least reveal another reflex circuit in the brain.
[1] PMID = 29695453
[2] Mervis, Jeffrey. “Data check: U.S. government shre of basic research funding falls below 50%.” Science, https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/data-check-us-government-share-basic-research-funding-falls-below-50 Accessed Feburary 2020.
Relevant quote: “There is a famous story of a drunk looking for his lost keys under a streetlight because the light is better there. … if we only look for cures where the light has already shone, we will make few if any new discoveries. Basic research shines a light into the dark corners of our understanding, and by that light we can find wonderful new things.”
— Dr Laurie Glimcher, M.D., President and CEO of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Richard and Susan Smith Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School
Originally posted on Instagram February 26, 2020
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