From the April 2017 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine

To meet their mission, foundations must ensure that their financial support leads to new patient treatments as quickly as possible. This sense of urgency is where collaboration becomes essential. If stakeholders are open to sharing their experiences, ideas and important data, the field can streamline research pathways, avoid duplication and enhance the impact of individual contributions to the field.

Open science is emerging as a methodology that facilitates collaboration by making important research products —experimental design, research data, preprints of publications — freely available as soon as possible. It has become too common in medical research to guard individual work closely, for a host of reasons, but that mentality can complicate and delay progress. A more open and collaborative culture is necessary to get to the finish line as quickly as possible. Government “big science” initiatives such as the Precision Medicine Initiative and the Cancer Moonshot have put a spotlight on promoting open science, particularly data sharing. Widespread accessibility of important data is necessary to meet their big goals — like achieving a decade’s worth of cancer progress in five years.


In addition to government, many private organizations that are passionate about driving progress — including the Focused Ultrasound Foundation — see open science as central to this mission and are employing open science practices and policies to govern the research projects they fund. Encouraging the use of open-access data repositories, establishing multi-site consortia to answer critical questions and making preprints of important publications widely available, among other practices and policies, will drive progress.

Making the case for collaboration: the essential tremor story
This past year brought a key turning point for the field of focused ultrasound when the FDA approved the treatment of essential tremor, marking the first use of the technology for treating the brain to be approved in the U.S. With this procedure, magnetic resonance imaging is used to guide multiple beams of ultrasound energy with extreme precision to a point in the central part of the brain.

At the point where the beams converge, the tissue is heated and destroyed in order to alleviate the tremor. The painless procedure can be performed without anesthesia, and it avoids incisions, burr holes in the skull or placement of electrodes in the brain, thus decreasing the risk of complications like infection or blood clots. The essential tremor approval opens the door in the U.S. to the treatment of other movement disorders, as well as psychiatric disorders, using precise ablation of known targets in the brain.

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