How do you come up with research ideas?
It can be fruitful to investigate areas that have been under-explored –
understudied medical conditions, or intersections of conditions (such as
pregnancy and autoimmune disease). In some cases, areas have been
overlooked for unfortunate historical reasons. More often, these areas have been
understudied because there are involved complex trajectories of disease that
span across different medical specialties and areas of biological expertise. To
make progress, we need to combine multiple types of biomedical data, using
both data-driven and knowledge-informed computational approaches.
We also work on scaling. Can we investigate 1000 research questions
simultaneously at low cost on existing data, to help prioritize which directions are
most worthwhile for following up with more resource-intensive prospective
studies?
Part of the challenge of good research is deciding which directions to pursue:
systems medicine research motivates us to find better ways to inform our
decisions, and to scale our technology so we don’t have to make as many trade-
offs.
The Hadlock Lab focuses on IMIDs. What are these, and why are they interesting?
The Hadlock Lab works on immune-mediated inflammatory diseases (IMIDs),
which includes a wide range of conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis,
inflammatory bowel disease and systemic lupus erythematosus. Each condition
is somewhat uncommon but altogether IMIDs affect hundreds of millions of
people worldwide. Studying these conditions pushes the boundaries on
understanding intersections between the germline genome, somatic
recombination in the immune system, exposures (infectious disease,
environmental factors, and drug treatments) and wide range of common medical
conditions and treatments across the lifespan.
We appreciate the interdisciplinary environment across ISB, because we know
that advances to help patients will come at the intersections of fundamental
biology, biotechnology, mathematics, data science and medicine.
What is one thing you’d like to see improved in the scientific community?
Some changes that have the potential to significantly improve patients’ health,
are difficult to implement within our existing healthcare ecosystem. As a result,
many projects focus on incremental improvements in treatment, and fewer
projects make long-term investments toward prevent the onset of illness and
injury. I think more funding is needed to support longitudinal studies for
preventative systems medicine. It would also be great to support more
collaboration with communities that have existing knowledge and creative new
ideas for improving health across the life-span.