I've just returned from a site visit to Stanford's new BioX facility, followed by a quick trip to Cambridge to see the recent developments at MIT and Harvard. My travels made me realize that we have to move at once to begin to develop integrative biological science as a top priority for Johns Hopkins University.
On Sept. 30, National Institutes of Health Director Elias Zerhouni announced some rather significant changes in how the NIH proposes to fund basic medical science. While the traditional organization of the NIH into disease-oriented institutes has served it well for approximately half a century, there is increasing evidence that these silos of disease focus are impeding the translation of basic biomedical science into benefits for patients. The NIH roadmap for the future attempts to overcome this impediment without disassembling the institutes' basic structure.
If you visit the NIH Web site created to explain the plan (www.nihroadmap.nih.
gov), you encounter sections headed New Pathways to Discovery, Research Teams of the Future and Re-engineering the Clinical Research Enterprise, which outline how teams of investigators from various disciplines (including and especially the physical and information sciences) will work alongside more traditional molecular biologists, geneticists, pharmacologists, physiologists and others to tackle complex problems. One can't help but notice how often the word interdisciplinary occurs in the context of these new research teams-a description that speaks volumes about the revolutionary change being proposed in how basic biomedical research is organized.
The NIH has done strategic plans before and ushered them in with great fanfare, only to result in business as usual. Perhaps what is different in this case is that Zerhouni has involved hundreds of the top medical scientists both within and outside the NIH in formulating this plan. The National Academy of Sciences recently released a report that also proposed a mechanism for how the NIH director could fund cross-cutting research initiatives that fall beyond the purview of any one NIH Institute.
Even if the NIH roadmap is not successful, the strong currents of biomedical research are compelling: Making critical discoveries in basic medical science demands integrating teams of physical, information and medical scientists. We know, for example, that most diseases are not the result of the malfunction of a single gene. Understanding how the cell works when dozens-perhaps hundreds-of genes control a specific trait expression will require new tools ranging from computation and rapid sequencing to proteomics, large molecular libraries, and so forth.
If the NIH roadmap is successfully implemented, it will have important funding implications for Johns Hopkins. Our ability to craft interdisciplinary, cross-functional teams that include engineers, computer scientists, physicists, mathematicians and biological scientists will determine our success rate in getting grants. It seems inevitable that this is the future of biomedical research. We'd better get ready.
