Experts call for more urgent need for breakthrough innovation in health science research

◎ Science and Technology Daily reporter Zhang Jiaxing

"By analyzing the top ten scientific breakthroughs identified by Science magazine in the past 13 years, we found that most scientific findings were conquered, accounting for 77.4%, while scientific breakthroughs that underwent paradigm shifts were rare, only 2.1%." At the recent Conference on the Development of Chinese Hematology, Dong Erdan, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, Liberal Arts Chair Professor of Peking University, and director of the Cardiovascular Research Institute of Peking University, said that accelerating the transformation from treatment-centered to people's health requires breakthrough leadership in scientific and technological development and innovation.

Photo courtesy of the Organizing Committee of the Conference

Scientific and technological innovation should be oriented to people's life and health, and the new era puts forward a new proposition of great health, which puts forward more urgent requirements for breakthrough innovation in scientific research. How to stimulate breakthrough, forward-looking but lagging recognition of technological innovation? What role will big data play in this?

Human health issues are transforming, requiring breakthroughs and innovations

Globally, the per capita burden of disease has decreased by 25 per cent over 20 years. Nevertheless, the disease spectrum has shifted due to problems such as air pollution, climate change, lifestyle changes, and infectious diseases. Air pollution, for example, causes 7 million premature deaths each year from diseases such as cancer, stroke, heart disease and lung disease. In 2019, cardiovascular disease deaths ranked first in the world, accounting for 33% of deaths and 15% of the burden of disease.

The problem of "population aging" is also becoming more and more prominent, and the United Nations 2019 World Population Forecast Report shows that "the number of women having children worldwide continues to decrease, the world population tends to age, the number of people over 65 years old is growing the fastest; the proportion of the working population is decreasing, which will put pressure on the social security system."

"To deal with the emergence of new problems, we can't treat headaches and feet." Dong Erdan believes that the breakthrough and innovation of great health needs to protect people's health in a multi-faceted, all-round and full-cycle manner from health, sub-health, high-risk, clinical symptoms, disease diagnosis to disease management, etc., and provide systematic and continuous integrated services for prevention, treatment, rehabilitation and health promotion. Therefore, the research paradigm and management ideas should be breakthrough rather than conquering.

The explosion of data has made new research paradigms possible

In the era of big data, the depth and breadth of health technology research continue to extend, from microscopic molecular cells to macro individuals, groups, and ecology, and the explosive growth of health technology data drives health technology to data-intensive research.

"In the era of big data, people's cognition of health will have a more comprehensive and in-depth perspective." Dong Erdan believes that the "map" of health science and technology innovation formed on this basis can play a better guiding role.

With the improvement of data processing capabilities, more and more platforms have carried out the construction of multiple data platforms to provide data support for scientific and technological policy decisions. For example, in 1999, the Global Forum on Health Research published a report proposing that health issues, which account for 90% of the global burden of disease, invested less than 10% of research funds, which led to the first recognition of the information asymmetry and imbalance between health needs and scientific and technological innovation.

Since 2012, the World Health Organization has also begun to try to collect and analyze health technology-related data in different countries and regions more accurately through the Global Health Research and Development Observatory. Start with funding scale, funding institutions, papers, patents, clinical trials, etc., to identify research priorities and build collaborative networks for health needs.

Health investment has increased, and scientific research management needs to pay attention to transformative leadership

Under the empowerment of big data, scientific research activities in the field of health have undergone leapfrog changes in efficiency.

"Decisions made by big data analytics can shorten the time period for some achievements to be as long as a decade." For example, the NIH data science team in the United States uses artificial intelligence machine learning models to predict the likelihood that research articles will be cited in clinical trials or guidelines in the future, so as to identify which scientific progress is likely to eventually translate into clinical applications at an early stage, in order to shorten the gap between scientific discoveries and clinical applications.

The trend of high R&D costs and high risk of failure in the health sector has been mitigated, and this trend has facilitated funding for biomedical R&D by different funding institutions. Data from the Global Health R&D Observatory shows biomedical-related funding in 2018, with 11 funding agencies reaching $33 billion, with malignant tumors being the largest.

"While increasing investment, scientific research management should change the direction of investment." Dong Erdan reminded that transformative research is not easy to predict, and a survey of 72 highly cited scientists in the field of ecology found that it is difficult to predict the contribution of research results to the field at the project application stage, and it is unrealistic to prove that research is transformative at the stage of writing research proposals. Therefore, science and technology policy and management should integrate science, public policy and innovation economics to evolve continuously, and can provide a new paradigm for science and technology policy and management research through multidisciplinary integration based on the "data-evidence-macro environment" of scientific metrology and informatics.

Source: Science and Technology Daily

Editor: Wang Yu

Review: Wang Xiaolong

Final Judgement: Wang Yu