Translational Research is Bidirectional Posted on October 19, 2007 Alan F. Schatzberg (bio) stresses the importance of starting from a clinical observation, then moving to the lab.

I think that translational research from my end, really, probably signify something a bit different, and some people have in fact talked about that. And that is that a lot of times what is a contribution to clinical care or clinical research, really starts with clinical observation, and then back to the laboratory, either to develop a tool to test it out or a drug, or whatever, and then back to the clinic. So much of what we kind of do, or where we imply, or in fact specifically state about translational research is really misleading from my end because you can’t ever start from an animal or pre-clinical observation. It doesn’t make sense. You really need to start always from a clinical observation and go back to the laboratory, and it doesn’t have to be an animal model, it could be developing a novel drug that will then attack the target and then going back and applying it to the clinical situation. So translational from my end should be bi-directional and we today, we imply, frequently, that it is uni-directional, from pre-clinical to clinical, and really it’s got to be bi-valence, it’s got to go clinical back to pre-clinical, back to clinical, sometimes going back and forth multiple times to develop the most optimal test or the most optimal therapeutic. So, I view translational as clinical to basic and back, bi-directional, informing or improving clinical care by using some sort of basic research.

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