What is translational research?

[Music] What is translational research? So translational research is the middle ground between basic science research, which is very basic fundamental biological research and clinical research, which is clinical trials where we test new therapies in with patients. So translational research is a fairly broad field. It covers any sort of disease biology associated research. And that can be many things. It can be a laboratory model that you do in a dish, but it has many of the elements of the human disease. So in myeloma, you hear a lot about bone marrow stromal co-culture models. That's sounds really complicated, but what it means is in a dish, we're trying to recreate the bone marrow microenvironment of myeloma. So there's bone marrow cells, such as stromal cells and stem cells and then myeloma cells, so that you have kind of a recreation of the bone marrow microenvironment. So that's one example. A second example is an animal model. So you hear a lot about xenograft models or engineered animal models of myeloma. Sometimes you can take myeloma cells out of a patient and transplant them into a mouse and then treat those mice with drugs to see if they work in a living system. So that's another example of translational research. Or you can take cells out of a patient, you know myeloma cells or other types of cells out of patients and analyze them to see if you can identify genetic mutations. For example. So any anything that touches on the actual disease, whether it's a laboratory model or experiments that you do with actual tumor cells from patients or other material from patients such as bone marrow immune cells and so forth, these are all examples of translational research. [Music]