NBCC Plans to Overcome Obstacles in the Research Process

By Chelsea Michael, DBCC Education & Outreach Coordinator

Throughout the NBCC Annual Advocacy Conference, speakers identified various obstacles and challenges in science that are especially relevant for breast cancer research.  They also suggested tactics to overcome these barriers to propel the field forward.  Some of the major challenges are related to translating new findings, career progression in academic settings and how information is shared between scientists.

Discoveries of new genes linked to
cancer must be translated into clinical
applications before they can help
patients. Photo Credit: ynse on flickr.com

Translation
When researchers make a promising discovery in the lab, the new discovery must undergo the process of translation so that it can be applied to humans in a clinical setting. 

• For example, when researchers working on the cellular level saw that some cancer cells had a bunch of special receptors, they discovered HER2+ tumors.  Pharmaceutical researchers then began to translate the HER2 discovery and created Herceptin, a drug that would target HER2+ tumors by binding to its special receptors.  The discovery of HER2+ tumors did not help a single patient until it was translated into a new treatment.

Speakers suggested the following strategies to improve translation, and hence improve patient outcomes:

• We need to strive for faster and more efficient translation.
• Basic scientists (who make the original discoveries) need keep translation in mind when designing their studies. 
• Society often celebrates new discoveries, even if they can’t be translated; we should be more modest in heralding new findings until they are translated.
• Locally, The Center for Translational Cancer Research (part of the Delaware Health Sciences Alliance) strives to improve research translation.

Innovation and Academia
Many speakers felt that the current way researchers establish their career in academia stifles innovation by restricting creative and new, but risky, approaches to research. 

• New scientists have to fit their research into an established lab’s work until they complete their post-doctoral fellowships.  Once they begin their own lab, they usually focus on work that is more likely to lead to publication so they can earn tenure.  By the time they can take on riskier projects, their careers are established in more conventional lines. 

NBCC has been encouraging innovative research through the Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Program and its idea grants.  The funding goes toward unconventional, but promising research.  NBCC also encourages advocates to talk to scientists, especially young scientists about how we can all work together to defeat breast cancer.

Sharing New Information
As mentioned above, only some research is publishable.  Typically only work that leads to a new discovery or advancement is published.  When it is published, the data are summarized and polished into a nice, neat package.  Three problems arise from this process:

• Negative and null results are devalued.  Experiments that do not lead to new findings, or when their variables do not seem to impact a process, are usually considered failures, even if we can still learn from them.
• Research that dead-ends is not shared.  Therefore if an experiment finds that a variable has no effect in one lab, a year or two later, another lab might repeat a very similar study.  The second lab could not build upon the first lab’s work to design a different and new experiment. 
• Most researchers do not share raw, uninterpreted data and only really show their work to the community once it is complete.  Researchers convert and analyze the data, then write an article for publication, wait for article review and revise the article before the article published in a journal and the public can read it.  The process slows down sharing information, as well as only lets us see the data from the researcher’s perspective.

NBCC is pushing for open notebook science to share more research findings and to share it more quickly.

• The open notebook movement encourages scientists to post their raw data and information about their on-going projects on-line.  Just as we can learn about long-lost friends’ families, jobs and lives on Facebook, open notebook science allows researchers to easily access what other laboratories choose to share about their on-going and un-published projects.