- As biomedical research becomes more specialized, no single laboratory can perform all of the necessary tests – but the search for collaborators presents problems of its own
- Feeling those same frustrations led scientist Elizabeth Iorns to create Science Exchange, an online outsourcing marketplace for researchers seeking problem-free collaborations
- Entrepreneurship isn’t easy, but research skills are transferable and the number of scientists starting businesses is increasing
- For those looking to get into business, the key is to follow your passions – even when it seems risky
The world of biomedical research is filled with technological possibilities – and the universe of options is constantly expanding. With so many different ways of tackling once-impossible problems, how can researchers keep up? It’s clear that no one person can learn all of the techniques needed to bring a project from idea to completion, but collaboration and outsourcing are difficult; it’s hard to know who’s best-placed to perform a particular experiment, or which service providers are most reliable. When Elizabeth Iorns began her academic career, she faced those same difficulties in her own experiments. That’s what led her to establish Science Exchange, an online marketplace where researchers can locate, evaluate and order from service providers – no muss, no fuss. Here, she speaks candidly about the challenges that entrepreneurial researchers face today, and how she hopes that her online platform might provide the step-up that they need to take ideas to reality.
Science Exchange’s Reproducibility Initiative and Elizabeth Iorns’ ambitions to produce the largest public dataset of reproduced work in the field of biomedical science The Reproducibility Initiative aims to provide an efficient way to run replication studies. Frequently, pharmaceutical companies and venture capitalists would bring us published studies and ask us to re-run the results. Just as we began to wonder why they were doing that, two publications came out that indicated that only about 20 to 25 percent of studies could be reproduced. So we decided that, although we were happy to provide private validations as a service, we also wanted the ability to publish those results so that the information was freely available. After all, what happens if a private validation fails – but it’s never published, so no one benefits from it? From that starting point, we reached out to more than 20,000 recently published authors to ask if they would be willing to have their studies reproduced. About 2,000 of them agreed, so we used that as the basis for a funding application – which taught us that, although funders were very interested in replication studies, they thought that the opt-in model would be biased toward reproducibility. So instead, they funded us to do the Reproducibility Project for Cancer, which was based on a selection of 50 high-impact cancer biology studies. That project is a collaboration between Science Exchange and the Center for Open Science. It uses the Science Exchange network and the Center for Open Science framework to replicate the experiments from these 50 high-impact cancer biology studies. The goal is to produce the largest public dataset of reproduced work in the field of biomedical science. The project is about halfway through now, so we’re just starting to get all of the results back. We’ll publish them in batches as they come in, and at the end, we’ll run a meta-analysis of factors associated with reproducibility. Since we began the project, we’ve had a lot of interest in validation studies from other groups. I’m optimistic that, as people see the results come out, they’re going to be more interested in funding replication studies in their own fields of interest. Most research funding is allocated to original work, but we’re hoping to provide a structured path to fund validation studies, because they’re vital to clinical translation. It’s problematic that industries currently run these studies independently, because they don’t publish the results, so the work is repeated and resources are wasted. That’s what we’re hoping to overcome with the Reproducibility Initiative.
Elizabeth Iorns describes why she feels the Genetic Diversity Project can really make a difference The Genetic Diversity Project is a really cool undertaking that raises awareness of both endangered species and the unique ways people use technology for conservation. The Kākāpō 125 Project, for instance, leverages the Science Exchange network to sequence the genomes of every remaining kākāpō, a critically endangered species of New Zealand flightless parrot. Why? It lets the Kākāpō Recovery Team look for the most effective ways to match the birds in breeding programs – and it’s already showing significant success. This past year was their most successful yet in terms of chicks born. The number “125” used to indicate the number of known living kākāpō – but it’s probably not accurate anymore! People keep finding newer and cooler ways of using genome sequencing. There are conservation initiatives out there like the Kākāpō 125 Project, and there are investigations into the vagaries of the human genome – like the Resilience Project, which looks for protective mutations against human genetic diseases. People used to hear “genome sequencing” and think “tumor biology,” but that’s no longer the case – and I think that’s fantastic.
Elizabeth Iorns is co-founder and CEO of Science Exchange, Palo Alto, USA. She is also a part-time partner of Y Combinator (Mountain View, USA), and mentors at IndieBio (San Francisco, USA).
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