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Contributed By Bernard GOUGET
SFBC-FESCC Representative, FESCC Advisory Board member
Integrated projects and translational research: Re-engineering the Laboratory Medicine Enterprise.
"There is science and the application of the science, like the fruits of a tree"
Louis Pasteur
2007 is an exiting time for laboratory medicine and health, with growing awareness that Laboratory Medicine, health and wellness are not just a national issue, but also an international one. Recently, Jocelyn Hicks, IFCC President and Mathias M Muller, IFCC past President, crystallized ideas, developed tangible strategies and defined very valuable new integrated project plans to stimulate networking between IFCC divisions. The aim is to galvanize action, to facilitate and to support cross-fertilization of knowledge to make significant progress on standardization and to promote good practice in laboratory medicine with the primary goal of improving patient safety and of promoting health in underserved communities. These major scientific innovative multi-sectional programmes will be defined collectively, with the objective to identify some thematic areas that no single working party or group could tackle alone, but that the whole of the IFCC needed to address.
Moreover, basic bioscience is revolutionizing the potential to improve the lives of individuals at risk and patients with acute or chronic diseases. Advances in our understanding of biologic systems and the development of powerful new tools that can be applied at both the bench and the bedside offer unprecedented prospects for advancing knowledge of human disorders in a translational context. Many laboratory findings hold tremendous potential for improving health care. In particular, research advances in genomics, proteomics, transgenic animal models, structural biology, biochemistry, immunology, signal transduction and imaging technologies have led to novel diagnostics and therapeutics. There is also a need to identify innovative road map initiatives to held major opportunities for advancing Lab medicine in the 21st Century. Translational Research is one of those themes and represents a broad new movement aimed at forging a meaningful interface between the basic and clinical sciences and its application in a clinical setting for the diagnosis, treatment, or prevention of a disease.
Today, combined with opportunities for true scientific inquiry in an intellectual environment conducive to such endeavors, there are good reasons to believe that the scope of knowledge and expertise need to be an effective translational. Clinical and translational science is an emerging discipline that encompasses both acquisition of a new knowledge about health and disease prevention, pre-emption, and treatment, and methodological research, which is necessary to develop or to improve research and diagnosis tools. The translational projects represent innovation in a broad array of scientific disciplines, with teams composed of researchers including basic or applied laboratory scientists, and physicians. The goal is to develop and disseminate technologies, compounds and expertise that will have a fundamental impact on both biology and medicine. The core strengths of the translational research will include the areas of combinatorial chemistry, protein engineering including therapeutic proteins, drug development, instrument development, informatics, proteomics and other "-omics" approaches to understanding biological systems, diagnosing disease and manipulating biological systems. The major argument for the integrated and translational research projects is rooted in the belief that advances in these areas have the potential to revolutionize the practice of Laboratory medicine, and to be a bridge to clinical practice.
The IFCC is continuously developing and maintaining a spirit of scientific cooperation and communication among its members. By the way, translational laboratory and clinical research are core components of full spectrum integrated projects. It is the first time that a robust, bidirectional information flow between basic and translational scientists is so necessary. The Federation, gathering international expertise, is also able to stimulate the development of novel approaches to unravel the complexity of biologic systems and their regulation and to provide unprecedented intellectual freedom to highly creative thinkers investigating problems of biomedical and behavioral importance. It is the responsibility of the laboratory scientists who are involved in today's biomedical and laboratory medicine enterprise to translate the remarkable scientific innovations into health gains for the patient and the citizen. As members of the world's largest organization in Laboratory medicine, we have the responsibility to work toward dissolving the artificial barriers, to challenge the status quo in transforming ways, through a "bottom-up" consultative approach, to stimulate the development of a brighter vision for integrated projects and translational research, ensuring that the laboratory scientists remain powerful engines of creativity. Finding a common language and a common ground of discourse among all may be the key to success of ambitious projects.
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