A scientist from the University of Toronto will be the first biomedical researcher ever to do a very simple—but potentially game-changing thing: She will share her research notes in real time to other researchers and the general public, in hopes of accelerating research on Huntington’s disease.
“This should drive the process faster than working alone,” explained the researcher, Rachel Harding, in a statement. “By sharing my notes, I hope that other scientists will critique my work, collaborate, and share data in the early stages of research.”
But more than improving her personal work on Huntington’s disease, having open and collaborative research could help researchers worldwide. Many scientists work in relative isolation, and only publish their work after years of research yield a positive result.
Another important piece of this method comes from what Harding doesn’t discover. Researchers need to know what hasn’t worked so they don’t spend time and money replicating the same negative results. Moreover, by publishing research live, scientists working on the same kind of research at the same time can feed off each other, learning from each other’s mistakes and suggesting new ideas that may have otherwise never come up.
Testing a new idea about testing ideas
Harding herself has already taken the first steps towards this sort of collaboration, by publishing her raw data and details of her research on the CERN open digital repository Zenodo. Further, she is posting regular updates written for people who aren’t research scientists on her blog Lab Scribbles.
“By providing access to raw data as well as the enabling research tools, we will help the community perform more robust experiments, which will accelerate the drug discovery process and potentially the development of new medicines,” said Aled Edwards, a Professor in the University of Toronto’s Department of Medical Biophysics.
In terms of Huntington’s disease, this sort of research may finally help us understand the actual mechanisms behind the disease. It’s generally known that a mutation in the huntingtin gene is what causes the disease, which leads to progressive cognitive decline and physical deterioration starting around ages 35 to 50 in those with the gene, but the specifics have eluded scientists for years.
For example, while genes make changes in the body by producing proteins, no one actually knows what the exact structure of the huntingtin protein is—a key part to understanding how it leads to the disease.
“This is a very large protein and difficult to study. It is significantly larger than most other proteins in the cell,” said Harding.
But by sharing her notes and discoveries with everyone, though, Harding has hope that this will change.
“This is what research is really like,” she said. “It’s not so much about big breakthroughs and polished results, but about incrementally getting closer to an answer. I think by being more open about our research we can all learn how to do the experiments better.”
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Pictured is Rachel Harding in her lab. Image credit: University of Toronto
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