Research & Discovery > How Discovery Science Powers Every Breakthrough at Mayo Clinic

How Discovery Science Powers Every Breakthrough at Mayo Clinic

By Alison Caldwell, Ph.D. Photography by Tony Pagel

Mayo Clinic’s vision for research is bold: to create a future of personalized, proactive healthcare by integrating pioneering science, data intelligence and clinical impact to accelerate the path from bench to patient bedside. This transformation relies on the essential, often unseen work of pioneering research science — the “bench” side of the equation. Through deep exploration of basic biology, Mayo Clinic scientists are opening pathways to new treatments and cures.

Often, the outcomes of clinical trials are what garner the most attention from the public and from media. Vijay Shah, M.D., the Mr. and Mrs. Ronald F. Kinney Executive Dean of Research, compares clinical trials to “the lead guitarist in a band,” because they are what everyone sees, and what gets featured in major news publications.

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“In most bands, there is also a very important bass player, who provides the rhythm that goes through the whole song,” says Dr. Shah, who is also recognized as the Carol M. Gatton Professor of Digestive Diseases Research, Honoring Peter Carryer, M.D. "The rhythm section is like our pioneering science — all the basic, foundational science research that we're doing."

Beginning with a strong foundation — a steady rhythm — is what allows clinicians and researchers to better understand serious and complex diseases, identify new drug targets and biomarkers, and consider new approaches to treating and curing disease.

“Pioneering science doesn't always get all the glory, but it’s so important because that's how we open up the aperture of all the science that we can tap into,” says Dr. Shah.

Without this basic science research, our knowledge will remain critically limited. “If we only do clinical trials on the science that we know, we're so constrained because we know just the tip of the iceberg of the total domain of science that's really there to know,” he says.

Even as Mayo Clinic continues to develop unprecedented new tools and treatments, such as pioneering AI algorithms to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease years earlier and powerful cancer-targeting technologies, many areas of human biology remain poorly understood. True cures for cancer remain frustratingly elusive; the biological underpinnings of psychiatric illness remain mostly unknown. In cases where we have treatments available, without pioneering science, it’s difficult to know if the current approaches are the best or most effective.

This discovery work is increasingly important for complex diseases. While technologies like CRISPR-CAS9 can edit single-gene disorders like sickle cell disease, most diseases are not so simple. Many serious or complex diseases are the result of a combination of factors — everything from a person’s individual genetic make-up to how their proteins are expressed to the environmental exposures they’ve had across their lifetime. To address them, scientists and clinicians need tools that aren’t available yet. By continuing and expanding this foundational research, Mayo Clinic researchers can develop the next generation of treatments.

“Probably a lot of what we think we know, we don't,” says Dr. Shah. “We could be misunderstanding the data or not seeing the full picture without additional research. That's why it's so important to keep doing that pioneering science."