Skip to main content
  • AACR Publications
    • Blood Cancer Discovery
    • Cancer Discovery
    • Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention
    • Cancer Immunology Research
    • Cancer Prevention Research
    • Cancer Research
    • Clinical Cancer Research
    • Molecular Cancer Research
    • Molecular Cancer Therapeutics

AACR logo

  • Register
  • Log in
  • My Cart
Advertisement

Main menu

  • Home
  • About
    • The Journal
    • AACR Journals
    • Subscriptions
    • Permissions and Reprints
  • Articles
    • OnlineFirst
    • Current Issue
    • Past Issues
    • CEBP Focus Archive
    • Meeting Abstracts
    • Progress and Priorities
    • Collections
      • COVID-19 & Cancer Resource Center
      • Disparities Collection
      • Editors' Picks
      • "Best of" Collection
  • For Authors
    • Information for Authors
    • Author Services
    • Best of: Author Profiles
    • Informing Public Health Policy
    • Submit
  • Alerts
    • Table of Contents
    • Editors' Picks
    • OnlineFirst
    • Citation
    • Author/Keyword
    • RSS Feeds
    • My Alert Summary & Preferences
  • News
    • Cancer Discovery News
  • COVID-19
  • Webinars
  • Search More

    Advanced Search

  • AACR Publications
    • Blood Cancer Discovery
    • Cancer Discovery
    • Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention
    • Cancer Immunology Research
    • Cancer Prevention Research
    • Cancer Research
    • Clinical Cancer Research
    • Molecular Cancer Research
    • Molecular Cancer Therapeutics

User menu

  • Register
  • Log in
  • My Cart

Search

  • Advanced search
Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention
Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention
  • Home
  • About
    • The Journal
    • AACR Journals
    • Subscriptions
    • Permissions and Reprints
  • Articles
    • OnlineFirst
    • Current Issue
    • Past Issues
    • CEBP Focus Archive
    • Meeting Abstracts
    • Progress and Priorities
    • Collections
      • COVID-19 & Cancer Resource Center
      • Disparities Collection
      • Editors' Picks
      • "Best of" Collection
  • For Authors
    • Information for Authors
    • Author Services
    • Best of: Author Profiles
    • Informing Public Health Policy
    • Submit
  • Alerts
    • Table of Contents
    • Editors' Picks
    • OnlineFirst
    • Citation
    • Author/Keyword
    • RSS Feeds
    • My Alert Summary & Preferences
  • News
    • Cancer Discovery News
  • COVID-19
  • Webinars
  • Search More

    Advanced Search

Hypothesis/Commentary

Reflections on Success in Multidisciplinary, Translational Science: Working Together to Answer the Right Questions

Elizabeth A. Platz
Elizabeth A. Platz
1Department of Epidemiology, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; 2James Buchanan Brady Urological Institute and Department of Urology, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine; and 3Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, Maryland
1Department of Epidemiology, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; 2James Buchanan Brady Urological Institute and Department of Urology, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine; and 3Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, Maryland
1Department of Epidemiology, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; 2James Buchanan Brady Urological Institute and Department of Urology, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine; and 3Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, Maryland
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
DOI: 10.1158/1055-9965.EPI-13-1061 Published April 2014
  • Article
  • Info & Metrics
  • PDF
Loading

Team science is becoming a norm in modern cancer research. The National Cancer Institute encourages multidisciplinary team science through Cancer Center Support Grants, SPOREs, and other funding opportunities. As an epidemiologist who conducts team science, I am often asked what are the attributes of our multidisciplinary, translationally focused prostate cancer research team and what is it about our research environment that has led to our shared success. After being asked these questions so many times, I began to realize that not all team science proceeds as smoothly as ours. Thus, over the past several years, I have reflected on the explanations for our team's success.

In this editorial, I share the factors that contributed to our team science success, including attributes of the team members, incentives to be a team member, institutional factors that support team science, and institutional and national infrastructure for team science. I point to some of the complexities that our team has experienced while conducting multidisciplinary, translational research. I highlight the need for the team to focus on the most important questions together as not to lose focus and to have the greatest impact. Finally, I mention the need to expand included disciplines to continue to move team science forward to solve cancer problems.

Factors That Have Contributed to Our Team's Success

Attributes of team members

  • Shared interest

    We all care about the problem of prostate cancer and we have shared interest in solving this problem.

  • Complementary expertise

    We each bring different, but complementary expertise to the team. Because our expertise is complementary, we are not in completion with each other.

  • Respect

    We have respect for each other and each other's disciplines. We actively foster in our trainees respect for and appreciation of the disciplines of our colleagues.

  • Generosity and trust

    We have a tradition of open exchange and helping and supporting each other. Our great and visionary leaders modeled this tradition.

  • Personalities

    Our personalities happen to mesh well, which leads to team cohesiveness.

Incentives to be a team member

  • Intellectual stimulation

    We find that learning about each other's disciplines, and how to jointly apply our methods to the same problem is intellectually stimulating.

  • Success begets success

    Mutual benefit from a shared endeavor is a powerful incentive to continue working together. Our team had immediate accomplishments, and continues to have success in identifying translational endpoints, publications, and grant funding to continue our work together.

  • Satisfaction in together training the next generation

    We formally and informally comentor each other's trainees, helping to energize and perpetuate our team and multidisciplinary approach. We are proud that together we have helped guide trainees who are going to be not just multidisciplinary, but intradisciplinary and transdisciplinary researchers.

Institutional factors supporting team science

  • Vision and strong leadership

    Historically and at present, our institution is known as a place to be for prostate cancer research.

  • Endorsement

    Our highly respected senior leaders endorsed team members and the multidisciplinary approach. They created opportunities for us to interact. But, we were not forced to work together; the team emerged organically.

  • Recognition of the scholarly efforts of investigators conducting multidisciplinary team science

    Our institution recognizes individual scholarly contributions of investigators who are together driving the work from their respective disciplines and investigators who make important scholarly contributions that change the approaches, directions, or the conclusions of the work conducted by multidisciplinary teams. This recognition is necessary for promotion; team science could not thrive in the absence of this recognition.

Institutional and national infrastructure for team science

  • Venues for exchange

    Our local and national prostate cancer research leadership created, and continues to support, venues for exchange between disciplines.

  • Research prioritization

    Translational research is a major emphasis of the national cancer research agenda. Some funders require translational projects and cross-discipline collaboration.

Complexities of Multidisciplinary, Translational Team Science

  • Time and resources needed to build critical mass

    It takes time, energy, money, opportunities for unforced exchange of ideas, and demonstration of success and mutual benefit, among other factors to build an effective team.

  • Many cooks in the kitchen

    Despite being a team effort, one team member has to take responsibility to see a project through to its optimal endpoint. Otherwise, partially completed projects, even very important ones, languish.

  • So many great ideas generated, so little time to pursue them

    So many great ideas are generated when researchers from multiple disciplines work together, but there is not enough time to pursue them all. Prioritization of research ideas is absolutely necessary to continue to have success together.

  • Reviewers not yet prepared to review multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary studies

    This is perhaps the biggest barrier at the moment. Until we train a sufficient cadre of full-fledged multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary researchers, we need to recruit big thinkers as grant application and article reviewers.

  • Financial systems not yet prepared

    Working across disciplines usually involves multiple divisions of an institution each with its own culture of financial management and own financial software. This is not a huge barrier, but additional time must be allotted for budgeting and management.

Team Science Is a Powerful Approach, but the Team Still Needs to Focus on Addressing the Right—That Is, Important and Impactful—Research Questions Together

  • Obligation to address, together, questions that will generate knowledge that is actionable

    Again, when many investigators from many disciplines work together, so many ideas can emerge. Teams can become distracted. To avoid this pitfall, teams must focus on thinking big. Especially at this time of limited resources and funding, teams have the imperative to ask and prioritize research questions that aim to make a difference for populations at risk of cancer, newly diagnosed patients, and cancer survivors. Advances will result from the richness of the multidisciplinary perspectives of the team.

  • Still need to conduct etiologic cancer research, though

    Foundational research is still very necessary to move biomedical science. But, in conducting etiologic research, the team must avoid “me too science.”

Moving Team Science Forward

  • Expand disciplines included in our multidisciplinary, translational research teams

    We need to learn how to collaborate with engineers and physical scientists to improve measurement, and information management and analysis. We also need to learn how to collaborate with interventionists to test the benefits of translational discoveries generated by team science, and then to implement and evaluate them. Learning how to collaborate will certainly involve learning each other's discipline's language and how to communicate ideas.

In summary, there is great value in working together across disciplines for individual researchers, for the team of researchers, for science, and importantly for populations and patients. Team science can be exciting to conduct because of the energy synergy. Team science has complexities, but these are not roadblocks to success.

Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest

No potential conflicts of interest were disclosed.

Disclaimer

The content is solely the responsibility of the author and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Cancer Institute or the NIH.

Grant Support

Dr. Platz is supported by Department of Defense grants W81XWH-12-1-0170 and W81XWH-12-1-0545, and by National Cancer Institute grants P30 CA006973, P50 CA58236, and U01 CA164975.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks the prostate cancer research team at Johns Hopkins for giving her the opportunity to participate in great team science. The author also thanks her fellow epidemiologists at Harvard for continued collaboration on prostate cancer, including for the shared testing by Johns Hopkins and Harvard investigators of basic science discoveries in populations.

  • Received October 11, 2013.
  • Revision received December 16, 2013.
  • Accepted December 22, 2013.
  • ©2014 American Association for Cancer Research.
PreviousNext
Back to top
Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers & Prevention: 23 (4)
April 2014
Volume 23, Issue 4
  • Table of Contents
  • Table of Contents (PDF)

Sign up for alerts

View this article with LENS

Open full page PDF
Article Alerts
Sign In to Email Alerts with your Email Address
Email Article

Thank you for sharing this Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention article.

NOTE: We request your email address only to inform the recipient that it was you who recommended this article, and that it is not junk mail. We do not retain these email addresses.

Enter multiple addresses on separate lines or separate them with commas.
Reflections on Success in Multidisciplinary, Translational Science: Working Together to Answer the Right Questions
(Your Name) has forwarded a page to you from Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention
(Your Name) thought you would be interested in this article in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention.
CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.
Citation Tools
Reflections on Success in Multidisciplinary, Translational Science: Working Together to Answer the Right Questions
Elizabeth A. Platz
Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev April 1 2014 (23) (4) 573-574; DOI: 10.1158/1055-9965.EPI-13-1061

Citation Manager Formats

  • BibTeX
  • Bookends
  • EasyBib
  • EndNote (tagged)
  • EndNote 8 (xml)
  • Medlars
  • Mendeley
  • Papers
  • RefWorks Tagged
  • Ref Manager
  • RIS
  • Zotero
Share
Reflections on Success in Multidisciplinary, Translational Science: Working Together to Answer the Right Questions
Elizabeth A. Platz
Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev April 1 2014 (23) (4) 573-574; DOI: 10.1158/1055-9965.EPI-13-1061
del.icio.us logo Digg logo Reddit logo Twitter logo CiteULike logo Facebook logo Google logo Mendeley logo
  • Tweet Widget
  • Facebook Like
  • Google Plus One

Jump to section

  • Article
    • Factors That Have Contributed to Our Team's Success
    • Complexities of Multidisciplinary, Translational Team Science
    • Team Science Is a Powerful Approach, but the Team Still Needs to Focus on Addressing the Right—That Is, Important and Impactful—Research Questions Together
    • Moving Team Science Forward
    • Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest
    • Disclaimer
    • Grant Support
    • Acknowledgments
  • Info & Metrics
  • PDF
Advertisement

Related Articles

Cited By...

More in this TOC Section

  • The Evolving Scale and Profile of Cancer
  • Physicians and HPV Vaccination
  • HPV Genotyping as Triage Marker
Show more Hypothesis/Commentary
  • Home
  • Alerts
  • Feedback
  • Privacy Policy
Facebook   Twitter   LinkedIn   YouTube   RSS

Articles

  • Online First
  • Current Issue
  • Past Issues

Info for

  • Authors
  • Subscribers
  • Advertisers
  • Librarians

About Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention

  • About the Journal
  • Editorial Board
  • Permissions
  • Submit a Manuscript
AACR logo

Copyright © 2021 by the American Association for Cancer Research.

Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention
eISSN: 1538-7755
ISSN: 1055-9965

Advertisement