Importance of scientific collaboration in contemporary drug discovery and development: a detailed network analysis

BMC Biology

Joseph Loscalzo¹  Yifang Ma²  Feixiong Cheng³  Brian Uzzi⁴ 

[1] Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, 75 Francis St., 02115, Boston, MA, USA;Department of Statistics and Data Science, Southern University of Science and Technology, 518055, Shenzhen, China;Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO) and Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, 60208, Evanston, IL, USA;Genomic Medicine Institute, Lerner Research Institute, Cleveland Clinic, 44195, Cleveland, OH, USA;Department of Molecular Medicine, Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine, Case Western Reserve University, 44195, Cleveland, OH, USA;Case Comprehensive Cancer Center, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, 44106, Cleveland, OH, USA;Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO) and Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, 60208, Evanston, IL, USA;

关键词: Cardiovascular disease;    Collaboration network;    Drug discovery;    Network analysis;    PCSK9;    Scientific collaboration;    TNF inhibitors;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12915-020-00868-3

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundGrowing evidence shows that scientific collaboration plays a crucial role in transformative innovation in the life sciences. For example, contemporary drug discovery and development reflects the work of teams of individuals from academic centers, the pharmaceutical industry, the regulatory science community, health care providers, and patients. However, public understanding of how collaborations between academia and industry catalyze novel target identification and first-in-class drug discovery is limited.ResultsWe perform a comprehensive network analysis on a large scientific corpus of collaboration and citations (97,688 papers with 1,862,500 citations from 170 million scientific records) to quantify the success trajectory of innovative drug development. By focusing on four types of cardiovascular drugs, we demonstrate how knowledge flows between institutions to highlight the underlying contributions of many different institutions in the development of a new drug. We highlight how such network analysis could help to increase industrial and governmental support, and improve the efficiency or accelerate decision-making in drug discovery and development.ConclusionWe demonstrate that network analysis of large public databases can identify and quantify investigator and institutional relationships in drug discovery and development. If broadly applied, this type of network analysis may help to enhance public understanding of and support for biomedical research, and could identify factors that facilitate decision-making in first-in-class drug discovery among academia, the pharmaceutical industry, and healthcare systems.

【 授权许可】

CC BY