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Pre-med and medical-school curricula have not kept apace with advances in scientific knowledge, according to a report by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a committee of the Association of American Medical Colleges. Physicians need more basic-science training, the authors argue.

But this is only half the story. Medical schools should not simply produce clinicians who understand the science of disease mechanisms. The more urgent need is for physicians who can translate research findings to a clinical setting — and most physician-scientist (MD/PhD) programmes do not focus adequately on this area.

MD/PhD courses typically generate physician-scientists who either become pure clinicians or focus on basic sciences like any PhD-trained biomedical scientist. But physician-scientists should be trained to translate innovations in the lab to the hospital.

Several medical schools are revamping traditional clinical-investigator programmes in an interdisciplinary, team-based approach to training. For example, Stanford School of Medicine, California, offers a graduate-level course, and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor runs a one-year fellowship in medical innovation targeted at medical residents and MD/PhD students.

In our programme at the University of Toronto, Canada, participants choose a clinical speciality outside their area of interest. Team members learn a speciality from practising physician mentors and spend eight weeks in a hospital observing medical procedures. Participants then focus on just a few projects based on criteria such as the importance of the market, team preference and disease prevalence. Teams often reach animal trials and even human studies if further development is commercially viable. Students work with biomedical engineers, entrepreneurs, and others to make advances in surgery, imaging and regenerative medicine.

Physicians with strong basic science can play a facilitating role in reconciling the science behind prototypes and assays with the disease mechanisms underlying the clinical needs. They need not be the ones discovering — that can be left to the scientists.

These programmes offer a systematic, science-based approach to innovation. Simple collaboration means a more efficient deployment of scientifically literate physicians. What we need are not more physician-scientists, but more physician-innovators and physician-facilitators.