Importance of scientific collaboration in contemporary drug discovery and development: a detailed network analysis
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Open Access
Importance of scientific collaboration in contemporary drug discovery and development: a detailed network analysis Feixiong Cheng1,2,3†, Yifang Ma4,5†, Brian Uzzi5 and Joseph Loscalzo6*
Abstract Background: Growing evidence shows that scientific collaboration plays a crucial role in transformative innovation in the life sciences. For example, contemporary drug discovery and development reflects the work of teams of individuals from academic centers, the pharmaceutical industry, the regulatory science community, health care providers, and patients. However, public understanding of how collaborations between academia and industry catalyze novel target identification and first-in-class drug discovery is limited. Results: We perform a comprehensive network analysis on a large scientific corpus of collaboration and citations (97,688 papers with 1,862,500 citations from 170 million scientific records) to quantify the success trajectory of innovative drug development. By focusing on four types of cardiovascular drugs, we demonstrate how knowledge flows between institutions to highlight the underlying contributions of many different institutions in the development of a new drug. We highlight how such network analysis could help to increase industrial and governmental support, and improve the efficiency or accelerate decision-making in drug discovery and development. Conclusion: We demonstrate that network analysis of large public databases can identify and quantify investigator and institutional relationships in drug discovery and development. If broadly applied, this type of network analysis may help to enhance public understanding of and support for biomedical research, and could identify factors that facilitate decision-making in first-in-class drug discovery among academia, the pharmaceutical industry, and healthcare systems. Keywords: Cardiovascular disease, Collaboration network, Drug discovery, Network analysis, PCSK9, Scientific collaboration, TNF inhibitors
Background A recent study estimates that in 2015, it costs the pharmaceutical industry $2.6 billion to develop a new US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved drug [1]. This high cost is, in part, a consequence of the collaborative complexity of the drug development process [2]. Contemporary drug discovery and development reflect the work of teams of individuals from academic * Correspondence: [email protected] † Feixiong Cheng and Yifang Ma are co-first author. 6 Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, 75 Francis St., Boston, MA 02115, USA Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
centers, the pharmaceutical industry, the regulatory science community, health care providers, and patients. Within academia, current drug discovery and development involve scientific collaborations between laboratories, is multidisciplinary, and almost invariably crosses inter-institutional boundaries among industrial and academic institutions. Scientific collaborat
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