After a successful kick-off meeting in December 2014, the four partners involved in the ‘Translational Science on the Global Stage’ collaboration met for a second time on May 28 in Amsterdam.
During the course of the day, the partners picked up where they left off in their last joint meeting by further exploring the nature and causes of the grand challenges in translational science. The ultimate goal is to define how the group can collectively address these significant hurdles in bringing new medicines to patients, more efficiently.
NIH-NCATS (USA) was represented by Christopher Austin, CDRD (Canada) by Karimah Es Sabar and Gregorio Aversa, and Stewart Hay attended for TIA (Australia). Representatives from EATRIS included Giovanni Migliaccio and Florence Bietrix (EATRIS C&S), Marian Hajduch (Chair, BoND) and Petr Kocis (EATRIS SAB). In addition, the four partners welcomed the contribution of MRC Technology (UK), represented by Mike Johnson.
This group works together to define three main focus areas for joint action:
- Create visibility and understanding of translational medicine;
- Offer a platform for dissemination of best practices in the field; and
- Improve productivity of the pipeline by focusing on alleviating systemic bottlenecks.
The group will discuss follow-up actions and concrete planning in the coming weeks during their monthly teleconference.
