Tapping the Public to Keep Scientists Current on Rare Disease Research

The search for cures for diseases is limited by the ability of scientists to consume and understand the rapidly expanding volumes of biomedical literature produced each year. Andrew Su, associate professor in the department of Molecular and Experimental Medicine at The Scripps Research Institute, has a solution. He wants to enlist members of the rare disease community and general public to become citizen scientists and pour through biomedical journals to help find connections and identify research in one area that may shed light on another. We spoke to Su about his project Mark2Cure, the role crowdsourcing can play in accelerating rare disease research, and why members of the rare disease community may better suited for elucidating important findings than supercomputers.