Modern-day bioscientific research is now at an economic crossroads. Specifically, the past 30 years have brought extraordinary advancements in biomedical knowledge, initiating the era of “personalized medicine”, therapies tailored specifically to individual patients’ genomic, epigenomic, and transcriptomic profiles, discovery of drugs based on computational analyses of massive datasets, and systems pharmacology (optimizing dosing and detection of adverse drug events). These have resulted in an exponential increase in our understanding of biological processes at the molecular, cellular, and organismal levels. Overall U.S. life expectancy (at birth) has risen from 74.7 years in 1985 to 78.7 years in 2010. Concurrently, the U.S. infant mortality rate declined by 42%, while mortality from heart disease and cancer decreased by 53% and 20%, respectively. Despite these monumental advances, the traditional manner in which
