Maximizing the Potential of Consortium Projects: A Reflective End-of-Year Review

This article was originally published on BioSci Consulting website.

Reflection is a process of examining your thoughts, processes, and life experiences. It can shape and change the way you understand the world and see past experiences.

For me, reflection is about expressing gratitude, and it is an opportunity to think about how to magnify what went well.

On the personal and family side, I am most grateful for being able to witness our children becoming more self-creating and independent. Our oldest, Wren, is learning to drive and trying to decide between medical school or biomedical science. Our middle daughter, Katelin, is taking part in international dance competitions, and our youngest, Finley, is learning that football (soccer) is about attempting many times and failing often in pursuit of the few times everything falls into place.

In the last edition of the newsletter, I wrote about slow strategies for moving fast in consortium projects. As for work over the past year, there are lots of examples of where there have been particularly efficient achievements, but there are three that I would like to highlight.

Constant Reinforcement of Interaction

In the project T2EVOLVE (1), partners developed an immunomonitoring standardization for CAR-T therapy. And then, the partners in T2EVOLVE worked together to validate the standard with experimental campaigns using the same CAR-T material across multiple centers.

The key to this success was a constant reinforcement of interaction driven by individuals who are doing what I would call scientific consortium project management. To magnify this in the coming year(s), I plan to recognize and emphasize this role even more in the projects we design and guide.

Patient Stakeholders as Partners

In the project imSAVAR (2), together with a group of partners, we have worked on engaging a group of patient stakeholders. It was a challenging task since imSAVAR is about building better preclinical models for predicting the toxicity of immune-modulating therapies. There are only a few examples where there is meaningful patient stakeholder involvement at this early stage of the drug development process.

We ran a process where the researchers presented some of the science happening in imSAVAR, which was followed by a dialogue with patient stakeholders. The issues that emerged were mapped into an issue tree, and ideas for new projects defined.

What emerged from this process was that patient stakeholders recommended doing more to consider gender in preclinical testing. This has sparked an idea for a bit of work to review the literature, and the next step is to engage the patient stakeholders in a project around gender in preclinical toxicity testing.

What made this work was the process of facilitating the interaction between the researchers and patient stakeholders, as well as the willingness of both sides to truly listen.

To magnify this in the future, I aim to build out the concept of what can be described as a Science Cafe with the additional features of designing projects (low resource wins) that can be the start of a true partnership.

Interproject Interaction

A third example comes from the project DRAGON (3), which is focused on diagnostics and prognostics for COVID-19. One of the ambitious goals of the project is to create a multi-factorial decision support system combining clinical, molecular, and patient-generated data. The challenge with COVID-19 is that the interest has shifted somewhat away from acute COVID-19 to long COVID.

Through interactions during the DRAGON conference, we have been able to forge a project that combines the efforts of DRAGON with Phosp-COVID (4) , a post hospitalization COVID cohort in the UK. This is still ongoing, but the potential insights to be gained by looking at a substantial long COVID dataset with molecular profiling and the AI analysis tools developed in DRAGON are exciting.

Why this has a lot of potential is that instead of sticking exactly to what was the plan 3.5 years ago, DRAGON and Phosp-COVID are working together.

To magnify this in the future, we intend to further facilitate the connections between projects, like we did in DRAGON, leading to concrete projects that will increase the meaningful impact of all those involved. This is what a community or ecosystem should be all about.

Looking Forward

As I mentioned, these are just a few examples. There are many more I can think of, but suffice it to say that there is a lot of untapped potential in consortium projects and disease foundations, and I am grateful to have the opportunity to work to realize that potential.

In the coming year, I intend to do all that I can to magnify the process of achievement in as many disease foundations and consortium projects as possible. It still takes too long for promising research findings to have an impact on the lives of patients.

Here is to wishing you and your families a wonderful end of the year, and here is to working with many of you to make 2024 full of opportunities to realize achievements that will fuel outcomes that will have meaningful impact on the lives of patients.

If you would like to talk about opportunities to increase your impact schedule some time with me here.