Translational medicine: science or wishful thinking?

Abstract

"Translational medicine" as a fashionable term is being increasingly used to describe the wish of biomedical researchers to ultimately help patients. Despite increased efforts and investments into R&D, the output of novel medicines has been declining dramatically over the past years. Improvement of translation is thought to become a remedy as one of the reasons for this widening gap between input and output is the difficult transition between preclinical ("basic") and clinical stages in the R&D process. Animal experiments, test tube analyses and early human trials do simply not reflect the patient situation well enough to reliably predict efficacy and safety of a novel compound or device. This goal, however, can only be achieved if the translational processes are scientifically backed up by robust methods some of which still need to be developed. This mainly relates to biomarker development and predictivity assessment, biostatistical methods, smart and accelerated early human study designs and decision algorithms among other features. It is therefore claimed that a new science needs to be developed called 'translational science in medicine'.