Transdisciplinary Team Science in Health Research, Where Are We?

Modern medicine and healthcare systems focus on diagnosing, treating, and monitoring diseases in clinical practice. However, contemporary disease burden is driven by chronic diseases, whose determinants occur across multiple levels of influence, from genetics to changes in the natural, built environments to societal conditions and policies. Conventional discipline-specific approaches are useful for the discovery and accumulation of knowledge on single causes of disease entities. Multidisciplinary collaborations can facilitate the identification of the causes of diseases at multiple levels, while interdisciplinary collaboration remains limited to transferring tools from one discipline to another, perhaps creating new disciplines (molecular epidemiology, etc). However, these forms of disciplinary collaboration fall short in capturing the complexity of chronic disease. In addition, these approaches lack sufficient power to generate knowledge that is translatable into implementable solutions, because of their failure to provide a holistic view limited their ability to capture the complexity of real-world problems. Transdisciplinary collaborations gained popularity in health research in the 1990s, when disciplinary researchers began to develop integrated research frameworks that transcended discipline-specific methods. Using cancer research as an example, this position paper describes the nature of different disciplinary collaborations, reviews transdisciplinary research projects funded by the US National Cancer Institute, discusses frameworks to develop shared mental models in teams and to evaluate transdisciplinary collaboration, highlights the role of team science in successful transdisciplinary health research, and proposes future research to develop the science of team science.