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.