The NCI and the Takeoff of Nanomedicine

This paper presents an analysis of the role of US National Nanotechnology Initiative’s Federal funding in the takeoff of nanobiotechnology and nanomedicine. Our comparative analysis of leading nanobiotechnology and nanomedicine scientists funded by the National Cancer Institute highlights the programmatic efforts of the NCI’s Alliance for Nanotechnology in Cancer beginning in 2005. We use a data science approach combining web data extraction, bibliometrics and social network analysis to identify leading nanomedicine and nanobiotechnology scientists and profile their research and commercialization efforts. By coupling leading nanomedicine researchers profiles to NNI Federal funding data we discover and document the relative importance of the US National Cancer Institute’s Alliance for Nanotechnology in Cancer (NCI Alliance) to the takeoff of nanomedicine. The NCI appears to be achieving its stated goal of contributing to both the scientific and commercial infrastructure of translational nanomedicine. Using Gilsing et al.’s innovation network embeddedness model from 2008 we find that the creation and strategic placement of NCI Alliance Centers at critical positions in the Alliance network has enhanced the ability of the NCI to build a sustainable architecture for nanomedicine and foster potentially disruptive pioneering innovation.