Our Patient-Centred Approach

Achieving a Patient-Centred Approach to Research

Research that provides direct benefit to patients has to meet several conditions.

  • Excellence: the scientists involved have to be leaders in their fields, and the study has to be designed to the highest standards.
  • Clinically relevant: clinicians who apply the study findings to the treatment of their patients have to be involved in the research from the outset, to ensure that the study addresses questions that clinicians are facing, and provides answers that clinicians can understand and apply in their daily practice.
  • Commercially interesting: patients need drugs and devices to manage the challenges to their daily life that are caused by their disease. Companies that are involved at an early stage in the research work, even on a non-exclusive, pre-competitive, collaborative basis, will be able to bring these products to market to benefit patients, in a more timely, less-expensive manner.
  • Knowledge translation: findings may not be translated into practice or products efficiently unless stakeholders are engaged up-front and consistently throughout the research process. Active measures have to be taken, based on proven knowledge translation principles, to ensure that discoveries are known and understood by:
    • Researchers (impact on research ideas),
    • Companies (impact on jobs and turning good ideas into tools that benefit patients),
    • Clinicians (impact on patient care),
    • Patients and their advocates (impact on understanding of what quality care is), 
    • Policy makers (impact on reimbursement practices, formularies, and benefit schedules to capture patient, economic and commercial opportunities arising from the research).

A Structure to Support Patient-Centric Research

OBI has assembled a range of components to ensure it achieves these objectives.

  • A Scientific Advisory Council that not only identifies the trends and opportunities in neuroscience that Ontario should address, but is broadly representative and prepared to operate in a collaborative, interactive manner with Integrated Discovery Program leads;
  • An Industry Advisory Council that is made up of company leaders committed to bringing the latest neuroscience research findings to market in the shortest period of time, for the benefit on Ontario’s patients, the skilled workers who will develop the products and the communities where they live and make an economic contribution;
  • Integrated Discovery Programs that assemble leading scientists, clinicians, patient advocates and companies to carry out ground-breaking patient centred research that enables companies to rapidly commercialize the discoveries;
  • Core Innovation Teams that work with the Integrated Discovery Program leads to harness the specific commercial opportunities;
  • An Experiential Educational Initiative (EEI) that provides neuroscientists who have an entrepreneurial objective, to gain the training, experience and contacts they need to achieve their aims.