If industry shifts toward unbiased discovery, can academia align?
The growing power of tools for holistically studying human biology should free researchers from narrow searches in discovery
Whether research should be hypothesis-driven or hypothesis-free, meaning unbiased, is a long-standing debate in science. Tools that make the latter more feasible are now pushing industry to embrace it more, for its potential to yield unanticipated findings that are — arguably — more robust.
But that embrace creates a fault line between what could yield better results, and what academics are typically rewarded for. The divide was discussed by panelists at BioCentury Grand Rounds, which took place Sept. 9-11 in Nashville, Tenn., and brought together academic innovators, biopharma executives and investors...