Inside Innovation

Connecting the Dots

One of MRF's goals is to promote interdisciplinary research. In 2003, when MRF pulled together its initial team of principal investigators, BCG used its network mapping tool to search medical databases for 56 different compounds and proteins relevant to MS treatment. This image shows a part of the map that resulted.

MRF was reassured to see that two of their hires—Brian Popko, a geneticist then working at New York University, and Steve Miller, a Northwestern University immunologist—were represented as relatively large circles. (The bigger the circle, the bigger the volume of relevant research.) The interface is interactive, so executives at MRF could mouse over any one of the nodes to see the underlying research data. Clicking on the node pulls up the actual abstract.

Dotting the edges of Popko and Miller's networks are nodes representing authors of related medical papers. (For readability's sake, the names of the authors of those papers are truncated to the first two letters.) The lines connecting the nodes symbolize either a citation link or co-authorship. And the numbers denote how many papers each person wrote and how many times they cited one another.

Miller and Popko's circles were unlinked. That meant they had not collaborated, or even cited one another's work in any of their published papers. That was something MRF aimed to change.