R&D Meets The Crowdscape: BioMed X Looks Outside For Insight

An extended inter-disciplinary approach to preclinical research may offer the best leads against today’s biggest challenges in medicine.

It is a cliché to say that pharma science loves to collaborate – the hard thing is that leaky decision framework by which good ideas do not get executed.

Crowdsource
Crowd science appeals as a remedy for declining productivity in the biopharma pipeline • Source: Gayle Rembold Furbert

Solving hard problems in biopharma usually starts like this: expert teams of specialists develop a research premise, test it in a carefully-defined cohort of patients and then validate the results using standard randomized methodologies. Failure rates are high because, at heart, drug research remains a messy exercise in improvisation. That is because we still do not know the basics of how nature uses physics to make the biology that determines individual health status.

Given the sheer number of variables in disease causation, an extended inter-disciplinary approach to preclinical research may offer the best...

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