Short report
The international effort: building the bridge for Translational Medicine: Report of the 1st International Conference of Translational Medicine (ICTM)
1 The first Affiliated Hospital of Wenzhou Medical College, Wenzhou, China
2 Department of Surgery, Clinical Sciences, Lund University Hospital, Lund, Sweden
3 Department of Clinical Oncology, Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Kowloon, SAR, Hong Kong
4 Department of Environmental Genetics, Harvard School of Public Health, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, USA
5 Department of Cell Biology and Medicine, State University of New York-Downstate Medical Center, Brooklyn, NY, USA
6 Department of Environmental Health, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA
7 University of Munich, Germany Children’s Hospital, Munich, Germany
8 Tallinn University Of Technology (Estonia), Lund, Sweden
9 Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative & Pain Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA
10 Department of Pharmacology and Neuroscience, University of North Texas, Fort Worth, USA
11 Strategic Medicine, Inc (PA, USA) and Strategic Medicine, the Hague, BV, Netherlands
12 Centro de Investigación i+12 del Hospital Universitario 12 de Octubre, Avda de Córdoba s/n, Madrid, Spain
13 Department, Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, Fatebenefratelli & Ophthalmiatric Hospital Milan, Milan, Italy
14 Deptartment of Measurement Technology and Industrial Electrical Engineering, Lund University, Lund, Sweden
15 Infectious Disease and Immunogenetics Section (IDIS), Department of Transfusion Medicine, Clinical Center and Center for Human Immunology (CHI), NIH, Bethesda MD, USA
16 Department of Advanced Studies, National Institute of Pathology, Bucharest, Romania
17 MISM Science & Technology Consulting - SCConsulting, Milan, Italy
18 Max F. Perutz Laboratories (MFPL) University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
19 Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Capital Medical University, Beijing, China
20 Biomedical Research Center, Fudan University Zhongshan Hospital, Zhongshan, China
21 Center of Cardiovascular Sciences, Albany Medical College, Albany, NY, USA
22 Hepatic Oncology, Zhongshan Hospital, Fudan University, Shanghai, China
23 School of Ophthalmology and Optometry, Wenzhou Medical College, Wenzhou, China
Clinical and Translational Medicine 2012, 1:15 doi:10.1186/2001-1326-1-15
Published: 14 August 2012Abstract
Background
Supported by the International Society for Translational Medicine (ISTM), Wenzhou Medical College and the First Affiliated Hospital of Wenzhou Medical College, the International Conference on Translational Medicine (ICTM) was held on October 22–23, 2011 in Wenzhou, China. Nearly 800 registrants attended the meeting, primarily representing institutes and hospitals in Europe, The United States of America, And Asia, and China. The meeting was chaired and organized by Dr. Xiangdong Wang, Xiaoming Chen, Richard Coico, Jeffrey M. Drazen, Richard Horton, Francesco M. Marincola, Laurentiu M. Popescu, Jia Qu and Aamir Shahzad.
Findings
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.
Conclusions
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.
