The international effort: building the bridge for Translational Medicine: Report of the 1st International Conference of Translational Medicine (ICTM)

The meeting focused on the communication of the need to foster translational medicine (TM) by building and broadening bridges between basic research and clinical studies at the international level. The meeting included distinguished TM experts from academia, the pharmaceutical and diagnostics industries, government agencies, regulators, and clinicians and provided the opportunity to identify shared interests and efforts for collaborative approaches utilizing cutting edge technologies, innovative approaches and novel therapeutic interventions. The meeting defined the concept of TM in its two-way operational scheme and emphasized the need for bed to bench efforts based directly on clinical observation.It was the meeting participants’ realization that the shared main goals of TM include breaking the separation between clinic practice and basic research, establishing positive feedback by understanding the basis of expected and unexpected clinical outcomes and accelerating basic research relevant to human suffering. The primary objectives of the meeting were two-fold: to accelerate the two-way translation by informing the participants representing the different disciplines about the state of art activities around TM approaches; and to identify areas that need to be supported by redirecting limited resources as well as identifying new sources of funding. This report summarizes key concepts presented during the meeting representing the state-of-art translational research and salient aspects of the ensuing discussions.It is becoming increasingly clear from the current state of the science that Translational Medicine (TM) should increase its international efforts. Advances in technology and medicine produced an unprecedented wealth of data which extends our understanding of human biology to a completely new dimension. Placing these data into useful context for developing better clinical practice is complicated by the sheer size of datasets being generated and the limited set