Successful research with broad scope and translational potential requires collaboration of individual researchers, disciplines and organisations.
Collaborative research takes advantage of a critical mass, drawing on expertise from healthcare professionals, skills and technologies from scientific teams, and clinical translation perspectives from staff and consumers. The benefits of extending research across multiple organisations allows for connection to resources and materials, recruitment diversity, sharing ideas and generating statistically significant data; resulting in research with greater impact.
But collaborations of this scope rarely just happen, sometimes it needs a nudge, including structures and frameworks to aid the process and enable new approaches into fields of interest.
As an alliance of major public hospitals, medical research institutes and academia – collaboration is our greatest advantage and opportunity. It is demonstrated across almost everything we do, notably through the VCCC distributed leadership model, which facilitates multidisciplinary, multi-site research opportunities. Collaborators work together to identify key clinical challenges, creating conditions that are also a common prerequisite for funding.
Mechanisms for collaboration include consultations, grand challenge debates, Delphi surveys, presentation of real-world evidence, workshops and symposia that take a bottom-up approach, and build consensus on priorities.
The VCCC Research and Education Lead program is a cornerstone of the alliance, providing leading clinician-scientists with protected time and resources to engage and work with networks beyond the typical hospital or laboratory setting. The program provides the capacity to develop practical avenues for collaborative research in areas of need and opportunity.
Last month the Research and Education Lead, Melanoma and Skin Cancers program launched an interactive melanoma education series for clinicians and trainees about the latest advances in melanoma diagnosis and treatment to ensure best practice and equity of care for melanoma patients around Victoria.
“Our new education series is designed to ensure greater awareness of latest advances in melanoma treatment,” says Associate Professor David Gyorki. “It provides access to an interactive setting to translate world-leading research into clinical knowledge and apply this to the diagnoses and management of melanoma using case studies."
“It provides access to an interactive setting to translate world-leading research into clinical knowledge and apply this to the diagnoses and management of melanoma using case studies."
VCCC initiatives have contributed to attracting significant funding for several multidisciplinary research projects. These range from data driven approaches to predict the economic impact of cancer treatments, to developing organoid technology utility to personalise treatment for head and neck patients, and testing the addition of immunotherapy to current standards of care for women with advanced endometrial cancer and patients with high risk subtypes.
Over the past year, VCCC-enabled collaborations have helped to recruit investigators, prioritise research questions and bring together diverse perspectives to drive meaningful and relevant research that takes us towards our goal of better outcomes for patients with cancer.
For enquiries about VCCC Research and Education Lead program, contact Dr Mark Buzza, Head of Clinical Research programs e: [email protected].
