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 translational research, innovation and interdisciplinary research and to consider their connections. The term "translational research" is now being used to describe many things-both types of research as well as research processes.1According to an National Institutes for Health (NIH) Office for Translational Research (http://www.niehs.nih.gov/about/od/otr/), the definition of translational research differs even among NIH institutes. However, common to these definitions is the concept of using research to realize tangible benefits for individual and population health. This concept is clearly not new and is a basic 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 basic and circumscribed, will help to realize better health. However, interest in demonstrating the "translational" nature and the connections of research to tangible beneficial goals has been reinvigorated by the explicit attention to "translational research" in the NIH roadmap initiatives and its priority for funding these types of projects.2 Often cited when describing translational research, particularly for clinical 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 clinical research 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 "translational blocks." Impediments to activities involved in transforming basic laboratory research findings into clinical sciences and human subjects' applications (historically also termed development research-as in product development) are called the T1 …