Translational research converts scientific innovations arising from laboratory experimentations, clinical efforts, or public health studies/reports into clinical/treatment methodologies to mitigate disease occurrence, morbidity, and transience. From lay mans’ point of view to explain what is translational research requires more elaborative way of delineating it. Fundamentally, translational research comprises of two processes of translation. One is the process of relating discoveries engendered during research efforts in the laboratory, and in preclinical endeavors, to the development of clinical studies in human subjects. The second process of translation pertains to research aimed at augmenting the implementation of best practices in the society.
If we happen to still critically dissect this area, translational research can be further classified into three processes for our understanding. Translational research is a three step process where experiments performed in a laboratory are translated into treatment regimes and/or therapies that are successfully incorporated into healthcare practice.
The first step in translational research is to investigate the cause of a health condition or a specific treatment method. Scientists then look for novel ways to approach few of medical science’s most perplexing issues.
The breakthroughs realized in the laboratory are used to help proceed for clinical trials where research outcomes are given a practical feel. During this phase of drug development, trial subjects and human participants are exposed to the outcomes/approaches from the lab and data about subjects’ responses, impressions and reactions is documented. If a positive result is realized, third step is to put the outcomes/approaches into practice. Clinicians implement the researcher’s outcomes, supported by the data from the clinical studies, and human subjects receive a new form of therapy or treatment.
Considering a “bench to bedside” approach where scientists take what they comprehended at the research bench and apply it to sufferers at their bedside marks the third and final process of translational research. If the new treatment or therapy confirms to be less valuable at the bedside than it was in clinical studies, the scientists are provided with comments so that they may re-work to perk upon their original outcomes/ findings.
In a non-medical way one can define if asked what is translational research as, “a useful means more generally where scientists try to condense the time-frame and fuse the basic-applied field, to ‘translate’ elementary research outcomes into practical methodologies”. It is essentially a much more iterative approach of research, with low and leaky hurdles and with much more interaction between scholarly research and community practice.