How Research Builds Better Care

Picture the last time you picked up a prescription from the pharmacy. Maybe you needed a brief course of antibiotics or statins to lower your cholesterol. Taking the pill takes just a few seconds, but its journey from the lab to you was decades in the making.

“Scientific research is the foundation for your health care,” says James McKiernan, MD, interim dean of the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and CEO of ColumbiaDoctors. “It allows researchers to understand how diseases work, what kinds of treatments would be safe and effective, and how to prevent you from getting sick. Much of this research takes place in universities, where doctors, scientists, and engineers make critical discoveries that lead to treatments people use every day.” 

That pill in your hands may be small, but it represents years of questions, answers, challenges, progress, and billions of dollars worth of work—all to improve your health now and in the future.

From Testing Cells to Treating You

That pill started as a question: what do we need to know to be able to treat this condition? Researchers turn to their labs for answers, where they start by studying the building blocks of the condition up close. Discovering the basics, like the source of cells that lead to pulmonary fibrosis, gives scientists a starting point for knowing what kinds of treatments would be most effective.

With that new foundation of knowledge, the question shifts to: how can we translate these discoveries into treatments? This means going from studying diseased cells under a microscope to developing new molecules to treat them, a process that takes years. Our bodies and what makes us sick are complex, so there is rarely one single approach that could work. Researchers develop and test options under different conditions in the lab and then in animals to monitor their effects.

When researchers find an approach that looks promising in animals, the next step is clinical trials, where it is given to people to find out if the treatment is both safe and effective. At this point, universities begin collaborating with pharmaceutical companies that can develop it into a medication to use in the trials. Clinical trials alone can take over a decade and happen in three phases: 

• Phase I: Focuses on safety, using a small number of healthy volunteers to identify side effects.
• Phase II: Measures safety and effectiveness in a larger group of volunteers, including patients who have the disease, and identifies the most effective dosages.
• Phase III: Monitors long-term effects in a very large group of volunteers, sometimes with thousands of participants.

Once clinical trials show that the treatment is safe and effective, the pill can be approved by the Food and Drug Administration, and providers can begin prescribing it. The pill’s decades-long journey finally ends when you pick up that prescription from the pharmacy and take your first dose. 

Improving Health From All Angles

Medications aren’t the only goal of research. Researchers create devices like joint replacements that restore movement and alleviate pain and develop new surgical procedures that speed up recovery. They even work to prevent disease in the first place by studying things in our environment that may make us sick now or over time.

All of this work involves collaboration, continued funding, and communication to make sure treatments are getting to the people who need them.

Most importantly, research doesn’t stop after a medication or therapy reaches your doctor. No treatment will work equally well for everyone. Scientists continue to study both new and established treatments for years to understand their long-term impacts and create alternatives to help as many people as possible.

Research Advances Lead to Care Advances 

Medical research is the pathway to better health for all of us.

“Discoveries at Columbia have led to breakthroughs in identifying, treating, and preventing illnesses and injuries, saving countless lives,” says Dr. McKiernan.

Though the benefits may not always be immediate, each step in the process leads to a healthier future for us and for future generations.