Strategies to Quicken the Pace of Medical Research
Using online gaming to generate ideas that help accelerate the pace of medical research and drug development
Field of Work: Accelerating the pace of medical research
Problem Synopsis: Owing to misaligned incentives among those who fund, conduct, commercialize and regulate medical research, the number of new treatments and cures for chronic and life-threatening diseases has stagnated since the 1950s.
Synopsis of the Work: On October 7–8 and November 9–10, 2010, the Myelin Repair Foundation—which aims to speed the discovery of treatments for multiple sclerosis—held Breakthroughs to Cures. The online gaming event allowed players to brainstorm new ways to accelerate the pace of medical research and shorten the time to market for new medicines.
Key Results
Some 400 players on five continents produced thousands of ideas. They included using telemonitoring and Skype video to enroll patients and speed data collection in large-scale clinical trials; creating a “botnet” composed of 100 million personal computers to aid computational drug analysis; and offering “X Prize style” contests that offer large monetary rewards for treatments and cures for intractable diseases.
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Related
- Speeding the Process of Making Medical Discoveries and Moving Them Into Treatment June 29, 2015
- Breakthroughs to Cures November 1, 2010
- Gamers Forecast Use of Mobile Devices, Social Networks and Advanced Data Mining to Accelerate Medical Research January 24, 2011
- Games for Health September 1, 2009
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