Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA—representing a coalition of dozens of advisors and workshop participants from academia, government, nonprofit foundations and industry—have issued a new call to arms for tight, well-funded integration of life science, physical science, computer science and engineering, to set up radical new advances in health care and biomedicine.
The report, titled “Convergence: The Future of Health,” advocates boosting funding of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) for “convergence research” to as much as 20 percent of the NIH budget. And it calls for a “Convergence Working Group” that, advised by representatives “from both academia and industry,” would lay out a long-term strategy for such integrative research.
Beyond interdisciplinary research
The new report has its roots in another MIT study from five years ago, which framed the convergence of biology, physical science and engineering as a “third revolution” in life science (after the earlier revolutions wrought by molecular and cell biology and genomics). The report stresses that the convergence it’s envisioning goes well beyond traditional interdisciplinary research. Instead, it would represent “the integration of historically distinct disciplines and technologies into a unified whole that creates fundamentally new opportunities for life science and medical practice.”
Such tight integration, the report’s authors argue, will prove essential in solving some looming “grand challenges” in biomedicine, such as the emerging threat of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and the rising costs of health care and prevalence of chronic diseases and dementia as global populations rapidly age. “Convergence might come just in time,” one of the report’s lead authors, the neuroscientist Susan Hockfield, noted in a press release.
Photonic enablers
The report cites four key areas—imaging, nanotechnology, regenerative medicine and big data—as examples “among a vastly larger set” in which approaches that integrate life science, physical science and engineering can provide step-function progress. Optics and photonics feature heavily as enabling technologies in many of these areas. The report cites in particular the role of imaging technologies such as Raman spectroscopy and photoacoustic tomography; the potential role of 3-D printing in regenerative medicine; consumer-focused smartphone sensors that can add to diagnostic data sets for machine learning; and the emergence of optogenetics as a core life science technology.
Indeed, the report names the Obama administration’s Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) initiative—an undertaking that has heavily involved the implementation of photonic and optogenetic techniques, and that was the subject of an OSA Incubator Meeting in 2013—as a prime example of an existing, well-funded U.S. government initiative with a strong convergence agenda. Approaches integrating various scientific disciplines also underlie the much-reported-on “moonshot” initiative of the National Cancer Institute launched early in 2016.
The funding dimension
Notwithstanding these areas of progress, Hockfield notes that the community will need to “overcome significant barriers” on the road to convergence. The key barrier cited by the report is, not surprisingly, money. The study notes that only 3 percent of principal investigators receiving NIH grants at present come from disciplines, such as physics, biophysics, mathematics and engineering, that lie outside of the traditional life sciences. The sole NIH institute with a convergence flavor, the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, commands only around 1 percent of the total yearly NIH research budget.
To address that situation, the report recommends steady increases in NIH allocations to boost convergence research to 20 percent of the NIH total “without detriment to other research budgets.” The authors believe that the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and DARPA should also implement spending increases to advance convergence research, as an ongoing, core part of their operations rather than an interdisciplinary add-on.
Roles for industry
Beyond government funding, the siloed nature of other participants in the envisioned revolution, including industry and education, also constitutes a roadblock to convergence research, according to the report. Recognizing that, the report recommends that U.S. federal agencies, universities and industry collaborate in a strategic roadmap to support and prioritize convergence-based research. And universities and companies both will need to start thinking across traditional department and disciplinary boundaries in research funding, hiring, career grants and promotion.