Driving Medical Innovation Through Interdisciplinarity: Unique Opportunities and Challenges

Many health problems facing society are multifactorial and often require social and political input as well as interventions from medical and technological experts. For example, the treatment of chronic pain requires expertise from multiple disciplines: imaging technology, cellular electrophysiology, neurochemistry, genetics, social, psychological, and cultural studies (1). While these activities are coordinated by the treating physician, they usually remain parallel and are never fully integrated to create an innovative therapy for the patient. From a research standpoint, we argue that for these new solutions to emerge, there needs to be a concerted effort to move from multidisciplinarity to interdisciplinarity. Multidisciplinary research is defined as work involving researchers from different fields who “remain conceptually and methodologically anchored in their respective fields” (2). In contrast, interdisciplinary research is defined as “a mode of research by teams or individuals that integrates information, data, techniques, tools, perspectives, concepts, and/or theories from two or more disciplines or bodies of specialized knowledge, to advance fundamental understanding or to solve problems whose solutions are beyond the scope of a single discipline or area of research practice” (3). It may lead to the creation of a new scientific field, such as environmental humanities (4–6). The major difference between the two types of research is that while interdisciplinarity involves deep and robust integration of distinct disciplines, multidisciplinarity implicates juxtaposition of a variety of expertises (5). By these definitions, both research types are clearly valuable, but interdisciplinary research should drive more impactful results for complicated problems. These advances come at a cost for researchers because interdisciplinarity has its own set of unique challenges, ranging from communication issues to allocation of credits among a team. In this article, we discuss these hurdles and potential solutions to raise awareness amongst researchers keen to lead a successful interdisciplinary project.