A great challenge facing modern medicine today is the clash between the short-term, earnings-driven requirements of the medical marketplace and the risky, long, and capital-intensive process of bringing medical ideas to fruition. With the substantial funding needed to develop new, innovative ideas, fewer ideas are finding their way out of research institutions and into the hands of experienced clinicians and medical product development teams. The techniques and processes required to move past this hurdle is known as translational medicine.
The Translational Medicine Alliance was formed in March 2007 to address the national and international leadership vacuum in translational medicine, to gather the best ideas of thought leaders and to develop an integrated strategy to support and advance the most promising technologies.
The first meeting of the Alliance, the Translational Medicine Alliance Forum, brought together opinion leaders from the major stakeholder groups—patients, foundations, academia, government, investors, and industry—involved in translational medicine. The primary goals of the forum were to facilitate discussions about translational issues and to discuss how stakeholders can work together to accelerate commercialization of medical products.
The Translational Medicine Alliance Forum Proceedings documents the forum’s discussions in the critical areas of funding, research and development collaboration, education and institutional policy. It also examines specific translational issues in various therapeutic areas, as well as medical devices and new tools and technologies to facilitate research. It concludes with the thoughts of national leaders on the future of medicine and definitions of success in translational medicine.
The Forum’s founding partners are the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson, Biogen Idec, FasterCures, Washington University, St. Louis (WUSTL) School of Medicine, BioVentures for Global Health, the Center for Emerging Technologies, BIOCOM, BIOTECanada and LifeTech Innovations.
