health care policy. Vicki Seyfert-Margolis (Senior Advisor, Science Innovation and Policy Office of the FDA) gave a presentation (of her views) that helped explain why research expenditures are increasing while the drug pipeline is getting smaller. She described the medical product ecosystem as a large community of individuals from academia, biotech/pharma, device/diagnostic companies, regulators, payers, physicians, and patients, and discussed how all parties need to be involved in changing their practices to improve outcomes. Seyfert-Margolis closed her presentation by focusing on the public’s (patients’) role in changing health policy and how, through social media, the public can become more involved and influence direction.
Changing the world is hard
Sage’s mission is ambitious and audacious. Simultaneously tackling three major problems, as Sage is trying to do, has significant risk. So, what can they do to mitigate their risk and improve success? I’ll close by offering a couple of suggestions.
Education is needed—The numbers of researchers who understand the kinds of data that are needed and how to analyze those data and develop network models is small. Further, technology advances keep moving the target, and evaluating models requires additional bench research and others need to be convinced that this is worthwhile. Sage is on the right path by initiating the conversation, but more is needed to increase understanding and evaluating data. Creating a series of blog articles and tutorials would be good first steps. It would help if presentations focused less on final results and more on data collection and analysis processes.
Be Bold—Part of the Sage Congress included presentations about a federation experiment in which a group of labs collaborated by openly sharing their data with each other in real time. This is a good step forward, that would be great if the collaboration ran as a publicly open project where anyone could join. Open it up! Success will be clear when a new group, who is unknown to the current community, forms and accomplishes interesting work with their own data and the Commons data. A significant step forward, however, is the openness of the meeting itself as all slides and video recordings of the presentations are available. Additionally, Twitter and other forms of real-time communication were encouraged.
In closing, I laud Stephen Friend and Eric Schadt for founding Sage Bionetworks and pushing the conversation forward. For the past two years, the Sage Commons Congress has brought together an amazing and diverse group of participants. The conversation is happening at a critical time because health care needs to change in so many ways. We are at an amazing conversion point with respect to science, technology, and software capabilities that the opportunity for having an impact is high. Geospiza is focused on many aspects of the mission, and we look forward to helping our customers work with their data in new ways. It’s been a pleasure to have the opportunity to participate and help advance progress.
[Editor’s Note: This post first appeared on Geospiza’s company blog.]
