ABSTRACT

If translational medicine (TM) is the future of therapy, as the

chapters in this book suggest, what might this future look like?

Changing a research paradigm that has remained substantially

unchanged for 50 years will no doubt require considerable time,

money, effort, and leadership. Nevertheless, there is reason to

believe that TM is more than just wishful thinking and will have

staying power in the precarious world of scientific mood swings

and the pendulum of investor and institutional funding cycles and

scythes. It has become enmeshed with the evolutionary sweep of

precompetitive collaboration, biomarkers, pharmacogenomics, and

personalized medicines, which will enable the incipient movement

from population-based to patient-centered target markets [1]. In

this final chapter, we reflect on the future of TM in the context of

a broken R&D paradigm and the impetus toward patent-centered

healthcare. We also discuss TM in the global context before drawing

some final conclusions about the future of the field.