What is Needed to Promote Translational Research and how do we Get it?

To introduce this series on Strategies for Innovation and Interdisciplinary Translational Research , I want briefly to frame some of the issues we will be exploring. To do that, it is helpful first to define some of the terms in our series' title, namely research, innovation and interdisciplinary and to consider their connections. The term research is now being used to describe many things-both types of as well as processes.1According to an National Institutes for Health (NIH) Office for Translational Research (http://www.niehs.nih.gov/about/od/otr/), the definition of differs even among NIH institutes. However, common to these definitions is the concept of using to realize tangible benefits for individual and population health. This concept is clearly not new and is a underpinning of public support for biomedical research. Read most NIH grant applications, and you will find an outlining of how the proposed specific aims, even when and circumscribed, will help to realize better health. However, interest in demonstrating the translational nature and the connections of to tangible beneficial goals has been reinvigorated by the explicit attention to research in the NIH roadmap initiatives and its priority for funding these types of projects.2 Often cited when describing research, particularly for investigation, is a model put forth in a report from the Institute of Medicine's Clinical Research Roundtable on Challenges facing the Clinical Research Enterprise. 3It depicts the continuum progressing from basic biomedical research to clinical science and knowledge to improved health and identifies the potential barriers to progress along this continuum as blocks. Impediments to activities involved in transforming laboratory findings into sciences and human subjects' applications (historically also termed development research-as in product development) are called the T1 …