Bringing rigour to translational medicine

Abstract

Translational neuroscience is in the doldrums. The stroke research community was among the first to recognize that the motivations inherent in our system of research can cause investigators to take shortcuts, and can introduce bias and reduce generalizability, all of which leads ultimately to the recurrent failure of apparently useful drug candidates in clinical trials. Here, we review the evidence for these problems in stroke research, where they have been most studied, and in other translational research domains, which seem to be bedevilled by the same issues. We argue that better scientific training and simple changes to the way that we fund, assess and publish research findings could red..