Introducing DELSA Global, a community
initiative to connect experts, share data, and democratize science.
Pizza
on Tuesday within 2 miles of home?
There
is a search for that. Find a long lost high school friend or an out of
print book? There are searches for that. Correlating genomic information
with proteomics data, patient information, and drug trial results? You’re
on your own. It is ironic and lamentable that internet queries can get
you information on so many things, yet the scientific data that are crucial to
finding cures for numerous diseases are often buried in an unusable format on a
hard drive in somebody’s garage.
Science,
technology, funding, policy, and media leaders will gather May 3-4 in
Washington, DC, to discuss the continued efforts of DELSA Global(Data-Enabled Life Sciences Alliance
International), which aims to accelerate and deepen collective,
community-wide innovation in the life sciences. Life sciences research
necessitates work across
diverse domains. This is especially true amongst computer,
cyberinfrastructure, and data experts in their effort to leverage opportunities
in data-enabled science.
Providing
straightforward, equal, and sustainable access to data, computing, and analysis
resources will enable true democratization of research competitions. In this
environment, investigators will compete based on the merits and broader impact
of their ideas and approaches rather than on the scale of their institutional
resources.
DELSA
Global aims
to assemble an open, robust, collaborative, supportive, and sustainable
ecosystem to enable greater utilization of existing resources.
Oftentimes, for example, it may not be possible to cross-reference crucial data
sets due to mismatched identifiers, incompatible formats or lack of technology
capable of handling the workload.
These
barriers can prevent the discovery of key connections between experiments that,
on their own, were unremarkable, but taken together, can support key research
insights. A digital commons is needed to facilitate data and knowledge
access.
Such a
system will serve to connect scientists and worldwide scientific knowledge and
holds immense potential for unrealized research benefits. Instead of being
thwarted by lack of resources, new ideas will be easily expanded or quickly
discarded to make room for other approaches.
Consequently,
the progression of data to knowledge to action will be vastly
accelerated, impacting every scientist, student, and citizen.
In May
2011, the necessity of a transdisciplinary
approach to life sciences research led to the creation of DELSA
Global to build and promote this ecosystem. DELSA Global proposes
to integrate expertise across life sciences and computing, industry and
academia, cyberinfrastructure and analysis, and policies and media.
The
Human Genome Project was a pioneering example of a transdisciplinary approach
in life sciences, yet it was just a start to the fully integrative mindset
needed to successfully tackle 21st century scientific problems,
which are more complex and diverse than ever before. Expertise must come from
all walks of life, and the boundaries of the disciplines must be blurred.
DELSA
Global doesn’t
start in a vacuum: multiple transdisciplinary initiatives are currently
underway. These include, for example, the National Institutes of Health’s CTSA
Institutes and Beta Cell Biology Consortium, the National Science Foundation’s
CIF’21 Program and Advances in Biological Informatics, and the Department of
Energy’s Bioenergy Research Centers and Knowledgebase, to name a few. But these
are the exception rather than the rule in life sciences, which still remains
largely segmented.
The
goal of DELSA Global is to connect leaders, stakeholders, and
scientists all over the world and across all disciplines to take on grand
challenges in science, education, environment, energy, ecology, food, security,
and healthcare.
This
framework will include the development of a digital commons to share scientific
knowledge, identify and utilize initiatives from funding agencies, foundations,
and industry, and enable sustainable collective innovation. In addition, DELSA
Global has responded to recent community-wide requests for feedback
and information from agencies such as the National Science Board and the NIH on
data-enabled life sciences needs. These include, for example, broader
access to data and analysis resources, inclusion of diverse expertise to
transform data into action, and proper credits for data sharing, software
usage, and participation in large collaborative projects.
Next
month at its annual workshop in Washington, DC, DELSA Global will
continue these efforts by identifying up to 10 short-term (1-2 year) projects,
called TOP Projects. These projects will address diverse challenges
of the global society, include researchers and experts from multiple disciplines,
and be supported by DELSA Global through collaborative
connections and assistance with identifying funding sources.
Successful
science is not just about what goes on in the lab and the field; it also relies
on (to name a few) business acumen, cyberinfrastructure, and translational
approaches to transition a discovery from the lab into products. DELSA
Global will help its chosen project leaders through this process by
partnering them with seasoned Executives In Residence that apply real-life
expertise to all facets of project management, execution, and delivery.
Annually, DELSA will formulate a new set of TOP Projects and
evaluate the current TOP Projects to further refine the transdisciplinary
approach and identify improved methods for resource access and analysis.
Of course,
it won’t be easy. DELSA Global has identified a number of
challenges that must be addressed. As the need for transdisciplinary teams
grows, it has become obvious that the education, funding, and career
development aspects of science culture must adapt. These require a shift in
mindset from the one-scientist (one-lab), one-project approach so frequently
taught. It should also transcend the 20th century one-institute
(one-consortium), one-problem approach.
But if
successful, a collective transdisciplinary innovation approach should lead to trusted,
globally accessible resources, thus reducing waste and freeing minds and
resources for a further cycle of inquiry. One
study suggests that up to 85 percent of resources are wasted due to
stepwise inefficiencies in the process of moving research results to the
patients and clinicians. As both data producers and consumers, we can do
better.
Finding
pizza is useful if you are hungry; finding a cure is a gift of life if you are
suffering. What will you find today?
Acknowledgements: We sincerely thank
The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation for its visionary leadership in
supporting DELSA Global, as well as Rob Arnold, Peter Arzberger,
Christian Burks, Jack Faris, Geoffrey Fox, Evelyne Kolker, Natali Kolker,
Maggie Lackey, Courtney MacNealy-Koch, Chris Menztel, Vural Ozdemir, Charles
Smith, and Peter Tarczy-Hornoch for their insightful discussions.
Eugene
Kolker and Elizabeth Stewart
Eugene
Kolker is the cofounder and president of DELSA Global,
Chief Data Officer at Seattle Children’s Hospital, and Head of the
Bioinformatics & High-throughput Analysis Laboratory at Seattle Children’s
Research Institute. Elizabeth Stewart is a Member of DELSA Global and
a Senior Scientist at the Bioinformatics & High-throughput Analysis
Laboratory at the Seattle Children’s Research Institute. Correspondence to eugene.kolker@seattlechildrens.org
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