Technology Touching Life Consultation

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== Q5. What structures, activities and mechanisms help establish a culture of interdisciplinary research and strong interdisciplinary leadership in universities, institutes and centres?   
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== Q5. What structures, activities and mechanisms help establish a culture of interdisciplinary research and strong interdisciplinary leadership in universities, institutes and centres?  ==
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#Please comment of the role that effective and inspirational leadership plays, giving examples where possible.
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The model of research Institutes, for example within the Durham University, works well. These include the Biophysical Sciences Institute, Wolfson Research Institute on Health and Well Being, and the Institute of Advanced Research Computing. These are groups that help to bring together researchers from many departments to help answer complex questions. They do not need to be highly funded and any research income goes to the researcher's own departments thus encouraging multidisciplinary working. Generally within Universities there can be significant tensions between departments within a faculty as the funding is limited and they are "fighting each other" for the limited resources. Using the Institute model different academics can come together and thus generally apply to larger funding (ie 3 PDRAs rather than 1) and with higher quality outputs as a result. It also means that traditional physics, engineering and computer science departments can apply for grants from say MRC, BBSRC, Wellcome Trust and biology and health departments look to EPSRC etc, or together, jointly with arts and humanities departments, go for the Leverhulme Trust funding. This also creates excellent potential routes to exploitation through into industry. Within Durham such Institutes within Durham have generated ~£30M in research income in the last three years for an investment of around £1M in the three main Institutes working in this area. The core reasons behind such successful collaborations are:
The model of research Institutes, for example within the Durham University, works well. These include the Biophysical Sciences Institute, Wolfson Research Institute on Health and Well Being, and the Institute of Advanced Research Computing. These are groups that help to bring together researchers from many departments to help answer complex questions. They do not need to be highly funded and any research income goes to the researcher's own departments thus encouraging multidisciplinary working. Generally within Universities there can be significant tensions between departments within a faculty as the funding is limited and they are "fighting each other" for the limited resources. Using the Institute model different academics can come together and thus generally apply to larger funding (ie 3 PDRAs rather than 1) and with higher quality outputs as a result. It also means that traditional physics, engineering and computer science departments can apply for grants from say MRC, BBSRC, Wellcome Trust and biology and health departments look to EPSRC etc, or together, jointly with arts and humanities departments, go for the Leverhulme Trust funding. This also creates excellent potential routes to exploitation through into industry. Within Durham such Institutes within Durham have generated ~£30M in research income in the last three years for an investment of around £1M in the three main Institutes working in this area. The core reasons behind such successful collaborations are:
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#Please comment of the role that effective and inspirational leadership plays, giving examples where possible.
#How might the Research Councils working with research organisations (e.g. universities and institutes), industry and other stakeholders help address the issues raised in response to the questions above? Please provide examples of successful approaches (both national and international) where applicable.
#How might the Research Councils working with research organisations (e.g. universities and institutes), industry and other stakeholders help address the issues raised in response to the questions above? Please provide examples of successful approaches (both national and international) where applicable.
#Finally, we would welcome any other comments you have on developing the 'Technology Touching Life' theme.
#Finally, we would welcome any other comments you have on developing the 'Technology Touching Life' theme.

Revision as of 14:34, 26 March 2015

Contents

Background

(This text is from the instructions. BioImagingUK has been asked to provide responses to this consultation.)

Building on our track record of working together to support interdisciplinary research across the physical, life and biomedical sciences, BBSRC, EPSRC and MRC are at an early stage in scoping a joint strategy to foster more diverse, fundamental, interdisciplinary technology development research. This is a new theme provisionally titled ‘Technology Touching Life’ (TTL). As part of the initial scoping exercise this consultation is being sent to universities/institutes, individual researchers, learned society contacts and industry representatives to garner views from the scientific community in order to inform the development of the TTL theme.

Discussions on TTL across the three Research Councils were initially stimulated by the EPSRC report The importance of engineering and physical sciences research to health and life sciences, published in May 2014. Fundamental breakthroughs in the life and biomedical sciences are often based on new physical science-based research technologies, which in turn often open up longer term opportunities for the economy and society. The TTL strategy aims to stimulate and support interdisciplinary collaborations to explore novel technologies and approaches that address application-driven challenges. By enabling joint working and two-way flow of ideas between life scientists and engineers/physical scientists we expect that TTL will ensure the UK leads future waves of foundational technology discovery for the life and biomedical sciences, and create new opportunities for commercial development.

Questions and Draft Answers

Within the broad scope of Technology Touching Life:

Q1. What are the ‘sweet spot’ areas where there is high potential for closer alignment across physical sciences and life sciences to lead to major advances?

There are literally dozens of opportunities across the life and biomedical sciences where a close alignment with the physical sciences could lead to major advances and discoveries. Three of the most pressing opportunities involve genomics and proteomics, imaging and the data sciences.

  1. In genomics and proteomics, we are on the cusp of a revolution. With critical advances in DNA sequencing and proteomic technology, most individual humans, domesticated animals and will soon their genomes sequenced, and their gene expression and protein abundance and modifications profiles mapped and know. The impact of having, for example, the gene expression and protein abundance profile of many different tissues in an organism, the different parts of a tumour, or the full lifecycle of an important food source can only be dimly imagined. It is very likely that this data when combined with other information (as described below) can lead to many important fundamental discoveries, diagnostics, and new therapeutic approaches for many modern diseases. Personal DNA sequencing is potentially a quite lucrative commercial market as well and the availability of affordbable genome sequencing will open up a large number of commercial opportunities. The resources to fund the development of new gene sequencing and protein profiling technology, which will require innovations in chemistry, engineering and data analysis should be considered a major strategic scientific, social and commercial priority. This will make good on the promise of this revolution and ensure the UK is a prominent player on the world stage in these domains.
  1. Imaging delivers measures the molecular and structural composition of biological and biomedical entities. Most importantly, many imaging modalities are capable of measurements in space and time. Imaging systems that provide spatio-temporal map, when combined with spectroscopic capabilities that reveal probe environment allows different components using a variety of spectral and or probe technologies means that it is now routine to probe the molecular and structural makeup and dynamics of biological systems. In the future by combining the physical and life and biomedical sciences we can foresee the development of new imaging modalities where most of texture combined with the spatio-temporal resolution to reveal chemical physical composition and dynamics that have to date not been available. One example is the current development in many labs worldwide imaging using mass spectrometry where isotopic analysis is used to reveal the chemical makeup of biomedical systems. Imaging technology in the 21st century depends on the combination of development of new probes for revealing molecular and structural composition new detection modalities for revealing the composition of biomedical systems and as always ever-increasing demands for contrast and resolution for revealing the inner workings of these systems.
  1. Data Management, Analysis and Visualisation. All of these trends move towards creating larger and much more complex datasets. The computational requirements for handling the data created by genomic, proteomic and imaging studies is growing rapidly, and most estimates indicate that data volumes and the need for data processing will exceed the computational and storage capacities available. A critical need in the life and biomedical sciences is the delivery of new data compression technologies, data management systems, analytic and processing tools and reduction algorithms that work at large scales to deliver reduced results that enable new discoveries, diagnostics and therapies.

These are the most obvious big wins for combining efforts in the physical and life sciences. Many of the most important outcomes of these developments can’t yet be imagined. Application of new technology inevitably reveals opportunities and knowledge that was simply unimaginable before its development. One example is the scale and importance of the microbiome in humans and animals and the interaction of an individual animal or plant with its own microbiome. It is nonetheless critical to invest in the development of these technologies so that the UK can benefit from the scientific, social and economic benefits they will create.

Q2. What trends or developments in engineering and physical science technologies are already emerging which you think will have impact in the life and biomedical sciences?

There are several ongoing major efforts in the physical sciences that will have massive impacts in the life and biomedical sciences across research discovery diagnostics and therapeutics. Some major points that we foresee will be extremely important:

  1. Efforts across the range of photonics to make increasingly smaller, brighter, and cheaper light sources should translate into research, diagnostic, and therapeutic tools that have a wide range of applications.
  2. The development of new probes for measuring chemical and structural composition and environment in living tissues and organisms is proceeding and will be an important part of future the development of new discoveries and diagnostics. Moving forward the development of multi-modal imaging probes where complementary imaging modalities can be used to reveal the biological and biomedical structure and dynamics will be incredibly important for revealing the molecular basis of disease and the effect of candidate drugs on these diseases.
  3. Nanotech, in particular small engineered materials, which are useful for delivering medicines to specific locations or under specific conditions should be an extremely powerful technology that will deliver benefit for society and science.
  4. A huge opportunity for the development of computational technologies for managing, processing, and analyzing the very large, heterogeneous (“big data”) datasets acquired across all domains of the life and biomedical sciences will be fundamental for delivering the promise of stratified medicine and healthcare.

Q3. What important areas in the life and biomedical sciences are currently limited by existing technologies and require new technology developments to ‘unlock’ discovery opportunities and deliver a 'step change' in understanding?

Across all life and biomedical sciences there is a common challenge for handling sharing processing publishing and delivering knowledge from the large complex multidimensional, heterogeneous datasets that are now routinely collected in the life and biomedical sciences. This challenge has appeared because of the great advances in automation and detection in genomics, proteomics, imaging, and other quantitative modalities. As important as these technologies are, the computational tools for handling these datasets has not kept up. This challenge occurs in all domains of the life and biomedical sciences. Dedicating resources for computational tools is a critically important opportunity for investment and collaboration across the physical and life sciences.

Q4. What do you see as the key features of successful models of close working between physical sciences and life sciences in fundamental discovery research? Please use specific examples, national or international, where possible. You views on unsuccessful as well as successful models are welcome.

The current drive to interdisciplinary science is laudable and correctly recognizes the need to bring expertise from many different domains together to achieve substantial strategic goals that are important for science society and wealth generation. However the career and recognition models commonly in these projects derive from the now outdated need for an individual scientist to prove his or her own success for career progression, recognition and reward. While it is possible to bring scientists from different domains with different recognition and career progression mechanisms together, merely pretending these will combine and easily meld together is naïve.

There are examples where true cross-disciplinary collaboration has occurred but the normal academic career progression has been discarded. One notable positive example is the Allen Brain Institute in Seattle where engineers, biologists, and informaticians have collaborated to build (over a 15 year timescale, a timeline that stretches long past conventional project horizons) the Allen Brain Atlas, a resource that now is becoming the foundation for the development of new scientific discoveries in neuroscience. One notable aspect of the Allen’s work is that career progression and success for the Allen Insititute’s scientists are solely based on their contribution to the Allen Brain Institute’s mission and not their individual publication record, citation statistics, etc. Thus they are measured based on their contribution to the interdisciplinary project, not what part of the project they have somehow retained or branded for themselves. One message from this story is that large interdisciplinary teams that retain a focus on individual success may not be able to achieve the scale of accomplishment, discovery and contribution they might otherwise simply because the individual team members have to focus on their own progression and success.


Q5. What structures, activities and mechanisms help establish a culture of interdisciplinary research and strong interdisciplinary leadership in universities, institutes and centres?

The model of research Institutes, for example within the Durham University, works well. These include the Biophysical Sciences Institute, Wolfson Research Institute on Health and Well Being, and the Institute of Advanced Research Computing. These are groups that help to bring together researchers from many departments to help answer complex questions. They do not need to be highly funded and any research income goes to the researcher's own departments thus encouraging multidisciplinary working. Generally within Universities there can be significant tensions between departments within a faculty as the funding is limited and they are "fighting each other" for the limited resources. Using the Institute model different academics can come together and thus generally apply to larger funding (ie 3 PDRAs rather than 1) and with higher quality outputs as a result. It also means that traditional physics, engineering and computer science departments can apply for grants from say MRC, BBSRC, Wellcome Trust and biology and health departments look to EPSRC etc, or together, jointly with arts and humanities departments, go for the Leverhulme Trust funding. This also creates excellent potential routes to exploitation through into industry. Within Durham such Institutes within Durham have generated ~£30M in research income in the last three years for an investment of around £1M in the three main Institutes working in this area. The core reasons behind such successful collaborations are:

  1. There needs to be an intellectual/technical challenge for both sides that stimulates researchers. This could be developing something very novel, miniaturising a method already in place, or engineering something to be fully "fit for purpose" either in terms of performance or cost.
  2. An acceptance by all parties that all parties have individual expertise, and also ignorance, and listening and learning each others language early on, and throughout any project, is vital.
  3. The original question/goal must be very clearly stated, and only changed with agreement from all parties.


  1. Please comment of the role that effective and inspirational leadership plays, giving examples where possible.
  2. How might the Research Councils working with research organisations (e.g. universities and institutes), industry and other stakeholders help address the issues raised in response to the questions above? Please provide examples of successful approaches (both national and international) where applicable.
  3. Finally, we would welcome any other comments you have on developing the 'Technology Touching Life' theme.
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