![]() And rather than concentrating on a particular disease, each had developed unique platform technologies. They also had an established inclination for partnership and a record of ongoing innovation. Davis at Stanford, David Baker at IPD, and Peter Schultz at Calibr. Starting in 2014, the team identified three key Discovery Hubs, each of them working in different areas: the Stanford Center for Systems Immunology, the University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design (IPD), and Calibr at the Scripps Research Institute. If we could make those connections, our grantees could make faster progress on their projects. All we had to do was connect these promising researchers with others who could help move their discoveries closer to real-world applications. We had all the pieces of this rich discovery engine in place. A lab over there studying the immune system. But we realized that these often weren’t connected in a deliberate way. Looking at the foundation’s portfolio of grantees and partners a few years ago, we saw a broad spectrum of talent and innumerable great ideas, some of which had been seeded by Grand Challenges and Grand Challenges Exploration grants. One factor is the general lack of incentive for collaboration that underpins everything from tenure decisions to funding mechanisms in academia. 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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