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Opportunities and Challenges

Opportunities and Challenges

This type of medicine has helped to translate the remarkable scientific innovations occurred in the last years into health gains for the general population. This has been accomplished by:

  • Using advances in physics and materials science which offer new approaches to study or diagnose medical conditions.
  • Collecting, using and exchanging big data sets, knowledge and information.
  • Helping in expediting the incorporation of novel endpoints into clinical testing, thereby shortening the duration of clinical trials.
  • Facilitating the transfer of testable agents into the clinic, thereby leading to more rapid validation of new products and reducing costs associated with non-clinical testing.

However, there are many challenges still for this type of medicine, as it has to translate in a manner that will enable public health models for disease prevention or treatment in low-resource settings to be realistically and successfully implemented. This is possible by identifying the challenges to overcome to develop and bring to market novel methods for diagnostic, prognosis and therapy for urgent and unmet global needs.

Knowledge of many fundamental aspects of biology in health and disease is still insufficient to automatically translate current findings reliably into new and more effective prevention and treatment - the goals of translational medicine can be attained only through continuous investment and advances in basic biomedical and behavioural discovery coupled with efficient translational science. Fulfilling the unmet need of disseminating new knowledge in clinical and translational medicine can lead to a better clinical practice.

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