Grass-roots entrepreneurship complements traditional top-down innovation in lung and breast cancer
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s41746-021-00545-x.pdf
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1.08 MB
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Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Ramadi, Khalil B.
Mehta, Rhea
He, David
Chao, Sichen
Chu, Zen
Atun, Rifat
Nguyen, Freddy T.
Date Issued
January 21, 2022
Journal
npj Digital Medicine
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Citation
Ramadi, K.B., Mehta, R., He, D. et al. Grass-roots entrepreneurship complements traditional top-down innovation in lung and breast cancer. npj Digit. Med. 5, 10 (2022)
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Abstract
The majority of biomedical research is funded by public, governmental, and philanthropic grants. These initiatives often shape the avenues and scope of research across disease areas. However, the prioritization of disease-specific funding is not always reflective of the health and social burden of each disease. We identify a prioritization disparity between lung and breast cancers, whereby lung cancer contributes to a substantially higher socioeconomic cost on society yet receives significantly less funding than breast cancer. Using search engine results and natural language processing (NLP) of Twitter tweets, we show that this disparity correlates with enhanced public awareness and positive sentiment for breast cancer. Interestingly, disease-specific venture activity does not correlate with funding or public opinion. We use outcomes from recent early-stage innovation events focused on lung cancer to highlight the complementary mechanism by which bottom-up “grass-roots” initiatives can identify and tackle under-prioritized conditions.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. School of Engineering
Sloan School of Management
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Institute for Medical Engineering & Science
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-021-00545-x
