Translational research is a way of thinking about and conducting life science research to try and accelerate healthcare outcomes. Biopharmaceutical companies and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have funded billions of dollars into basic life sciences research and are have experienced the return on investment not living up to expectations. Translational research is a way to try and bridge this. The NIH and other major institutions have funded major infrastructure and support for translational research in the United States. The same is now occurring in several countries throughout the world.

The focus is to remove barriers to multi-disciplinary collaboration. By enabling physicians, basic scientists, pharmacologists and others to leverage biology techniques and technologies, translational research may enable more facile research, increased efficiency in drug development, and improve drug efficacy. At the same time, patients are expecting better treatment outcomes and in particular want treatments that have fewer side effects. Furthermore there is global pressure to reduce healthcare costs

There are many challenges to translational research. Universities are traditionally associated with basic research while technology institutes and biotech are typically associated with applied research. This separation is both cultural and physical as the separation across different institutions makes it difficult to establish the multidisciplinary and multi-skilled teams that are necessary to be successful in translational research. Other challenges arise in the traditional incentives which reward individual principal investigators over the types of multi-disciplinary teams that are necessary for translational research. Also, journal publication norms, and regulatory authorities often require tight control of experimental conditions, and these may be difficult to achieve in real-world contexts.

An attempt to bridge these research activities has been undertaken particularly in the medical and healthcare domain where the term translational medicine has been applied to a research approach that seeks to move “from bench to bedside” or from laboratory experiments through clinical trials to actual point-of-care patient applications. There needs to be a great deal of interaction between academic research and industry practice. Medical practitioners help shape the research agenda in providing what may be intractable problems to which applied research approaches will offer incremental improvements.

This session will address these issues with diverse input from a panel of highly experienced, multi-disciplinary research experts.


Jonathan Lewis
ZIOPHARM Oncology, Inc.
New York, USA