September 18, 2012 

Dawn Van Dam, General Manager, Cambridge Healthtech Associates :  After interviewing numerous professionals in the life science industry over the past six months, I've seen a common theme emerge: in an ideal world, sharing data with other companies and institutions would allow the development of better technologies and faster solutions. Words like "synergy" and "ecosystem" were used by interviewees to paint a picture of an idealized healthcare landscape in which breakthroughs are accomplished through collaborative efforts - where researchers share both their successes and failures.

In reality, however, the industry provides scientists with incentives that understandably keep them from sharing their findings with other industry leaders. Pharma researchers must protect their IP in order to preserve company integrity and maintain job security, and academics need to keep their findings quiet as they vie for the chance to publish. Therefore redundancies are common in research and those coveted breakthrough results don’t come along as often as they could!

It seems that professionals across the healthcare spectrum - scientists to CEOs - believe that collaboration in research through sharing data and findings is the solution to translate research to the clinic faster. Could increased collaboration in research really help push the industry forward, or is it simply too idealistic for a cut-throat, business-oriented world?

Many of the industry professionals who support collaboration in research suggest creating an incentive system that encourages data-sharing. One, a CTO and Head of R&D for a small organization focused in bioinformatics, believes strongly in combining efforts for more efficient research. In an interview for our study, he highlighted the cost/time benefits of collaboration: "I have an impression that many people do the same thing in a slightly different way, and each one with different funding in a different place in the world. So, I have the impression that a lot of energy is actually redundant." Sharing data can ensure that those vital funds aren’t being used up by redundant experiments and, instead, are put toward achieving new breakthroughs.