The global collaboratory11/11/2022 It’s not just vaccines, of course: You’ll find the same issues in just about every field of research. A researcher working on one aspect of a new vaccine may not know that halfway around the world another scientist is working on something that could help her. It could even mean the difference between 100,000 and 1 million doses. And yet small decisions in the lab can play a huge role in manufacturing. For one thing, if someone is an expert in, say, computational biology, they’re unlikely to also have the expertise to optimize the machinery that produces vaccines. There are a lot of reasons why promising lab research doesn’t make it into the real world and instead languishes in the valley of death. We’ve spent the past several years working on better ways to bring some of the most promising global health research into real-world applications. But for the most part, cooperation tends to be more ad hoc than baked into the system. Some labs consider collaboration a point of pride. So is the Collaboration for AIDS Vaccine Discovery (CAVD). The TB Drug Accelerator is structured around a model of R&D collaboration. This isn’t a new idea, of course: Scientists have been collaborating for generations, and science is always a process of building from one idea to the next. That’s the mission of the foundation’s Discovery and Translational Sciences team, where I serve as deputy director. So when I joined the foundation in 2013, I wanted to find ways to clarify that path, to help turn it from a bumpy road filled with dead ends to a smoother one that flowed more directly from research to reality. The path that could take lab research into the broader world was both daunting and unclear. It was fascinating work.īut over time, I began to feel that I knew more and more about less and less. in immunology and was conducting research that complemented my clinical practice, focusing on how the innate immune system sees pathogens. This problem has been recognized everywhere: At universities, at nonprofits, in the private sector, and here at the foundation.īefore coming to the foundation, I worked for 10 years as a medical doctor treating people with kidney disease. It’s not because the ideas aren’t useful. The chasm between promising lab breakthroughs and actual products or treatments has long been called the “valley of death,” a place where 90% of ideas die.
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