Irwin Arias, adjunct investigator and head of the unit of cellular polarity at the National Institute of Child Health and
Human Development and professor of physiology and medicine at Tufts University, summarizes those thoughts. “To me,
translational medicine is a term that means almost the same thing as bridge building between science and medicine; others call it bench to bedside,” he explains. “The principle is: How do you link up the incredible advances in science with better medicine? As with the metaphorical structure, this type of bridge building requires many different structural components. There is no single cure-all.”
In almost all cases, the field involves movement of intellectual property from the laboratory to the clinic. “It’s hard to overestimate the amount of good medical
treatment that comes out of good basic research,” Miskimins says. However, the activity can also move in the opposite direction. “A lot of people talk about the reverse of the bench to the bedside approach: taking things you can learn from the patient population to gain new insights into fundamental biology,” Narayan explains.
Translational medicine has a history. “It’s not a new concept,” asserts Arias, whom many observers regard as the godfather of the field. “The link between medicine and science was very strong in the 1950s, 1960s, and into the 1970s. It was not unheard of then for basic scientists to attend grand rounds.” But rapid advances in fundamental biology since then have focused basic researchers more on their lab work while changes in the nature of health care have made it increasingly difficult for clinical researchers to collaborate with their colleagues in fundamental science.
Those factors still hinder the progress of translational medicine. “Today, the opportunities to improve medical diagnosis and treatment based on science are extraordinary,” Arias says. “But we’re frustrated by changes in the health delivery system and medical education and the high degree of specialization in the progress of basic science.”