Pesquisa translacional em saúde coletiva: desafios de um campo em evolução

Abstract

(211). THE TRANSLATION OF THE ACHIEVEMENTS FROM BASIC SCIENCE into everyday clinical practice remains an important issue in contemporary health, and is addressed through the new subject of translational research, which aims to bridge the gap between basic research and its application in health. At first, it connected bench (basic) to bed research (clinical applications), which is also known as benchside-to-bedside research 2. The definition of translational research has evolved over time, ceasing to be a field linked to clinical research, with perspectives that were mainly focused on the development of new health technologies. There is an emerging consensus on four perspectives that comprise different stages of translational research in their broad scope based on their different purposes. The first phase involves processes that bring the ideas and the discoveries of basic research at an early stage to their application in human beings. The second phase involves the establishment of efficacy in humans and clinical guidelines for the incorporation of the clinical knowledge into practice in health systems and services. The third phase focuses mainly on implementation research and the dissemination of the application of knowledge. The fourth phase focuses on results on patients and population effectiveness, as well as equity-related issues, in order to verify whether the expected effects of technologies introduced into the health system were different across population groups. Currently, the European Society for Translational Medicine defines a broader scope for translational research as: an interdisciplinary branch of biomedical research supported by three pillars: bench, bed, and community research, whose goal is to combine subjects, resources , knowledge, and techniques, in order to promote advances in prevention, diagnosis, and therapies, aiming to significantly improve the global health system 3. The extension of the concept to health systems seems so obvious that one wonders why translational research has only recently caught the attention of health policy managers 4. The field of translational research encompasses laboratory studies, clinical demands, public health and health management, policies, and economics. It is crucial in the evolution of contemporary biomedical science, and its interventions follow political-economic, ethical-social, and educational-scientific approaches. Translational research may progress by reorganizing academic teams translationally. New translation-oriented academic positions are urgently needed 1. One of the reasons for the distance between basic research and its applications may lie in the increasing compartmentalization of science. Basic research, which seeks to discover the underlying principles of the natural world, is fundamentally different from applied research , which seeks to find ways to influence or control the world. Basic and applied research