Facilitating Cross-Disciplinary Interactions to Stimulate Innovation: Stand Up to Cancer’s Matchmaking Convergence Ideas Lab

Abstract

In the fall of 2014, the leaders of the high-profile nonprofit program Stand Up To Cancer (“SU2C”), whose mission is to raise awareness and funds to increase the pace of groundbreaking translational research that can get new therapies to patients quickly, and a group at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, a world-famous center for theoretical research in physics and mathematics, teamed up to propose a multidisciplinary meeting to explore novel approaches to cancer research. The participants would include quantitative scientists from various areas of the physical sciences (theoretical physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists, and engineers) and clinical oncologists, two groups whose disparate research fields do not traditionally intersect. They would be invited to a multiday meeting in order to develop research projects integrating quantitative approaches and clinical cancer research—an exercise in convergence science. The success of the meeting that eventually resulted from this partnership, in engaging a very diverse group of researchers in developing creative, quantitative science-based approaches to advance cancer research using clinical data, ultimately led to the formation of four cross-institutional, multidisciplinary teams of researchers pursuing novel translational research projects that are being funded through a combination of private–public grants. The collaborative efforts that resulted in the February 2015 Convergence Ideas Lab meeting and these Convergence Teams are described below, and might provide guidance for others seeking to organize and facilitate cross-disciplinary interactions to stimulate innovation.