| 1 | AAAS_org | Science Translational Medicine | 11316 | 40 | 2 | 51.3 | positive | 5:54 | Well, we need to continue our efforts at basic research to uncover new and fundamental knowledge. It's important to also focus on how this knowledge can improve human health in real terms. Often it's at the interface of disciplines that combine multiple fields of knowledge, the translation of the deeper scientific insights that come from the lab can find their beneficial expression in patients. That's what translational medicine is about. The most efficient way to understand all streams of knowledge and create new knowledge with it that has a direct impact on public health. There are engineers that devise new medical devices. There are biochemists that devise new chemical agents that can be used as drugs. There are computational biologists that devise algorithms that can improve imaging methods. All of these things are part of medicine, but they're from widely divergent groups with different expertise. The mission of the journal is to try to stimulate more effective science in this area by bringing the bare powerful voice for innovation. This journal, Science Translational Medicine, really truly reflects the need of the scientific community to focus on what we call the field of translational medicine. Why is that? It's become very obvious that over the past 10 years we've made an enormous amount of progress and discoveries at the basic level. But as we've done so, we've realized that biology is much more complex than we thought it was. And this daunting complexity makes it quite difficult to take that knowledge and translate it for human health for human patients. So this translation used to be quite linear in the past. You could do it quite straightforwardly, not anymore. You're doing it now, in part, because of the increased interest in translational medicine that we see coming from organizations like the National Institutes of Health, but from patient groups, from basic scientists who want their work to get translated into clinical practice. They need an outlet. They need a place to talk about this important interface between basic and clinical research. Innovation happens when you bring different ideas and different approaches together in new ways. And so this journal is a meeting place for those different ideas. And it will try to encourage in its reviews and in its editorials new ways of thinking about important problems. So this journal will be centered around original research papers that make significant contributions to translating basic science results into improvements in clinical medicine. Which we're also going to be having commentary from experts in many areas that touch on translational medicine, the regulatory environment, from pharmaceutical industry, from patent law, from people interested in legislation. That doesn't exist today. That's what this journal is going to do. So if you think about it, this is a sort of multi-directional process where basic research informs clinical research, clinical research informs basic research by posing critical questions that need to be answered. We want the journal to address problems that a broad group of scientists and physician scientists are interested in. We want to appeal to engineers. We want to appeal to clinical physicians. We want to appeal to chemists, basic scientists, people in pharmaceutical industries. Triple AS has published science for a long time and we do have another knowledge environment called science signaling. The whole of the hair at Triple AS is very excited about it. The partnership between translational medicine and Triple AS makes perfect sense. Why? As I said, you cannot make progress in translational medicine unless you understand. A, the complexity of the underlying science and B, the fact that it requires the collaboration of multiple disciplines and it requires people are willing to go out of their silos, one of the comfort zone and break the barriers that sort of constrain them to their very narrow point of view. Well, what organization really does that well? Triple AS. We expect this to be a tremendously important contribution to science because we'll provide a forum, we'll provide a venue where basic and clinical researchers can talk to each other. | ↗ |