Grant: Project Grant

Patient engagement in research means patients are partners on a research team. It can have many benefits, such as ensuring research results are relevant to patients. While this practice is becoming more common in clinical (human) research, it is less often used in laboratory (animal/cell) research. Our experiences (and others) with patient engagement in laboratory research has demonstrated the need for guidance on how laboratory researchers and patients can collaborate at this early stage of work. We believe patient engagement is important for laboratory research and want to develop guidance for researchers and patient partners. Our team previously identified all laboratory studies that included patient engagement and interviewed scientists and patients involved. Although few studies were identified, we found that patient partners can be involved in various aspects of laboratory research, including identifying priorities and presenting findings. Patient engagement improved researchers' understanding of the real-life implications of their work, while patient partners in these studies gained new insights into science and biomedical research. The main objective of our project is to identify how researchers and patient partners can work together in laboratory studies. Our proposed work will provide suggestions on how to improve this process. This guidance will be co-developed alongside patients and researchers through an international survey. We will also invite laboratory researchers and patients to test the guidance, and ask for their feedback on how it can be improved through surveys. The developed guidance will outline promising practices for patient engagement in preclinical research and allow more partnerships to be formed.