Interaction

Fall 2007

An ambitious agenda for health research

BY ANN ARVIN

Breakthroughs in basic science are fundamental to making major advances in human health. This equation sounds simple, but the path from an exciting basic laboratory discovery to a valuable practical application for the prevention or cure of human diseases has many barriers and wrong turns. Nevertheless, the Stanford faculty and their students have made many remarkable contributions in the right direction along this daunting road. The Initiative on Human Health (IHH), a major focus of The Stanford Challenge fundraising campaign, aims to accelerate Stanford’s contributions to improving human health and well-being now and in the years to come.

L.A. Cicero

As dean and vice provost, Ann Arvin oversees university research issues, interdisciplinary initiatives and independent labs, and the offices of Technology Licensing, Environmental Health and Safety, Sexual Harassment Policy and Research Compliance.

Success in making fundamental scientific observations and translating these observations into innovations that benefit human health is never one person’s achievement. The spark for the IHH is the recognition that building multidisciplinary research will determine what Stanford can do in helping people to live healthier lives in the 21st century.

In medicine, many important scientific questions originate in the mind of the insightful physician at the bedside. At Stanford, the same physician has often returned to the laboratory to find new therapies, sometimes with the help of researchers from other disciplines. Consider the example of Dr. Henry Kaplan and Edward Ginzton at the Hansen Experimental Physics Laboratory who, together in the 1950s, developed an approach to radiation therapy that saved the life of a child with retinoblastoma in its first application.

The goal of the IHH is to make this tradition a cornerstone of health-related research at Stanford. Even more than in past decades, we recognize that major advances in medicine are likely to be the result of multidisciplinary teams. The IHH goal is to offer our faculty and students opportunities to do such work.

Imaging, invention, integration

The IHH has identified three themes that define areas in which new research and training efforts could yield many benefits: imaging, seeing biological processes in ways that yield new therapies; invention, making tools that enhance research and devices that solve health problems; and integration, synthesizing the massive amounts of information emerging from vast databases related to human health.

• Imaging: Our modern knowledge about the human body began with the precise anatomical drawings of Leonardo da Vinci and others during the Renaissance. In the next iteration, microscopes were invented that revealed structures too small for the eye to see, laying the foundation for my field, microbiology and infectious diseases. Today, electron microscopes reveal cellular structures at the nanoscale and magnetic resonance imaging has revolutionized clinicians’ ability to diagnose illness and treat patients. We are about to make another leap forward in imaging, equivalent to the change from a still photograph to a movie. The 21st-century ways of “seeing” will involve watching events happen on a cellular level in real time in tissues, organs and entire organisms. Researchers will be able to watch thousands of neurons as they fire in response to a stimulus, rather than being limited to observations about a single cell. Clinicians will engineer molecules that can hunt down diseased cells at their earliest stages and literally illuminate them on a computer screen long before current methods would detect any signs of illness.
• Invention: New tools such as genetic sequencing and microarrays are changing the paradigm of health-related research. Instead of approaching a question with a preconceived hypothesis and testing it, researchers derive insights from a comprehensive analysis of the plethora of data produced with these tools. The pace of fundamental discovery science will accelerate accordingly. Scientists envision that devices used to do genetic and functional analyses of cells in the lab will become more powerful and less expensive, making it possible for clinicians to use them to obtain information about their patients’ susceptibility to diseases. Research at Stanford is also advancing the possibility of such inventions as artificial corneas, robotic surgical tools and chip implants in the brain to restore movement to quadriplegics.
• Integration: It might seem that scientists and physicians will be overwhelmed by the deluge of information these new tools are creating. Fortunately, the opposite outcome is more likely. Researchers in the new field of biocomputation are defining methods to synthesize data about genes and proteins into models that explain how cells of many different types actually work. Social sciences research integrates information from whole populations to identify risks to health that may never have been suspected. Integration of complex data sets could allow health care to be tailored to the individual—taking into account our genetic inheritances, the bacteria and viruses that we carry, or the precise abnormalities of a cancerous cell, along with details of our personal medical histories, to design preventive regimens or make rapid diagnoses and personalize treatments for each of us.
  

Fellowships and grants

These and other advances in human health are now inextricably linked to combining the clinical sciences with expertise from biological and physical sciences, computer science and engineering. More than ever, we need to train scientists and clinical investigators to master their own disciplines and to move comfortably across disciplines. The IHH will promote such educational opportunities for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows by establishing fellowships for trainees to pursue programs with advisers from more than one field. The IHH also will make possible new faculty appointments in key areas to enhance research and teaching related to human health.

Strengthening multidisciplinary bioscience and medicine requires incentives. Faculty who propose research at the intersection of disciplines often have trouble attracting support from the government and foundations because they are moving into uncharted territory. The IHH will give such ideas a boost by providing seed funds to projects that are judged by our faculty to be high risk but likely to have high impact if successful. This is a daunting task, but we already have a track record through Bio-X, the pioneering Stanford program to bridge the biosciences and the physical sciences. The Bio-X innovation grants awarded to multidisciplinary research teams have yielded impressive results. The $700,000 in grants has paved the way for $70 million in government support. The IHH will provide broad support for research in basic biological/biomedical sciences and Bio-X, as well as target new programs in neurosciences, stem cell biology and regenerative medicine, and cancer.

Stanford is one of the few universities with such an ambitious agenda for multidisciplinary innovation in human health. In taking on this challenge, we are fortunate to have our medical school on the same campus as the university’s six other schools. This facilitates face-to-face interactions between faculty and students with diverse expertise and with the clinical faculty at Stanford Hospital and Clinics and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital.

Through these interactions, we will build upon the remarkable advances in human health that have been achieved by the traditional medical disciplines. The IHH will serve as the catalyst for the next generation of innovators at Stanford to chart new directions in basic and translational health-related research.