What can you learn about innovation from the scientists behind the research?

Is your business innovating enough to stay competitive in today’s fast-paced environment?

We consistently hear from R&D leaders that access to cutting-edge, peer-reviewed research is essential for driving successful innovation and new discoveries. However, to better understand how breakthroughs happen, it helps to know the innovators as well.

• Who are the people working on the miraculous therapies of tomorrow?
• What unique approaches are they using effectively?
• How are they supported by their organizations?

To connect you to these stories, we recently launched “Innovation insights for life sciences”. Here you can find a wealth of interesting articles and resources that offer a “behind-the-scenes” look at what great researchers do best: discover and develop ground-breaking solutions.

These stories give you a glimpse into the people and companies behind the published research. For example, in the article “Elsevier and Every Cure: treating rare diseases with generic drugs — at scale”, we meet Dr David Fajgenbaum, who saved his own life by finding a generic drug that cured his own deadly disease, Castleman disease, before founding the nonprofit Every Cure to find treatments for other currently untreatable rare diseases.

“We worked with world experts in artificial intelligence and data science to create an optimal data science strategy. And that feels rock solid, especially since none of this would have been possible five years ago — AI has just advanced so much so fast,” said Dr Fajgenbaum in the article. “For this we need more data. And we’ve got groups like Elsevier contributing data towards our work, which is awesome.”

The “Innovation insights” website features many other recent stories that delve into how AI is changing the way that research in life sciences is now done, whether it’s Dr Jane Lomax discussing harnessing ontologies for pharma or Dr Anitha Golla talking about how AI is boosting productivity for chemistry researchers.

Many other innovation-focused topics in life sciences are featured as well, including drug repurposing, medical device regulation, and alternatives to animal testing.

In a truly fascinating feature article, Dr Thomas Hartung, a passionate advocate for strategies that are more effective than animal testing, talks about his work in organoid intelligence (OI), which could help with treating Alzheimer’s. Here’s an excerpt:

Yes, these innovations have also spurred controversy. “When I first presented in 2016 on the brain organoids we are producing, some people were shocked and thought somehow these would spontaneously become physiologically active — that these cells would short-circuit and start communicating or something,” says Dr Hartung.

“But these cells have nothing to think about: there’s no input or output. And this actually gave me the idea: let’s give them input and output. And that’s what we’ve been busy with for the last three years.” Basically, the hope is to create biocomputers where the lab-grown brain organoids serve as biological hardware — a dizzying proposition since when it comes to size, the human brain’s computational power remains unparalleled.

From drug safety to the therapeutic properties of fungi, there are many topics and ideas to explore on our “Innovation insights” site – and we are regularly adding fresh content that highlights innovative new avenues of research and the scientists who are exploring them.

We believe these insights are complementary to the vital research you are already accustomed to finding in Elsevier’s journals. Join us on this journey into the heart of leading-edge research!

Visit the “Innovation insights for life sciences” page now.