Charting a Course for Precision Oncology

The fields of science have undergone dramatic reorganizations as they have come to terms with the realities of the growing complexities of their problem set, the costs, and the breadth of skills needed to make major progress. A field such as particle physics transformed from principal investigator-driven research supported by an electron synchrotron in the basement of your physics building in the 1950s, to regional centers when costs became prohibitive to refresh technology everywhere, driving larger teams of scientists to cooperate in the 1970s, to international centers where multinational teams work together to achieve progress. The 2013 Nobel Prize winning discovery of the Higgs boson would have been unlikely without such team science. Other fields such as the computational sciences are well on their way through such a transformation. Today, we see precision medicine as a field that will need to come to terms with new organizational principles in order to make major progress, including everyone from individual medical researchers to pharma. Interestingly, the Cancer Moonshot has helped move thinking in that direction for part of the community and now the initiative has been transformed into law.