New Year's resolutions

Here are a few of the things that Nature Medicine is looking forward to during 2009.

The economic and political events of the past few months ought to color one's predictions of what the new year is going to bring. How big will the effect of the global financial crisis be on scientific and healthcare budgets? How many start-up companies will have to close and sell their intellectual property at bargain prices to 'big pharma'? How many people will be laid off from research labs in industry and academia? Will the incoming US administration begin to turn the tide for biomedical research and drug development?

It won't be long before we get some answers to these questions, and we will surely have plenty of opportunities to use this page to reflect about the key developments of the next year. So, instead of trying to predict what the coming months will be like, we wanted to share with our readers a few of the things that Nature Medicine is planning for 2009.

This past year, we completely revamped our News section and added two new features to our News and Views—“Community Corner” and “Between Bedside and Bench.” But, for Nature Medicine's standards, 2008 was rather quiet. So, our plan for this year is to restart some of our past projects and create a few new ones.

To begin with, we will work again with Roche to organize the second Translational Neuroscience Symposium in Basel, Switzerland, next April. Building on the success of the first one, which focused on psychiatric diseases, this year, the meeting will focus on autism and other developmental brain disorders, a field that needs some fresh thinking to develop badly needed therapies.

We will then return to San Diego in October for the fourth meeting of our series Frontiers of Clinical Investigation: Bench to Bedside, which we organize with the Clinical and Translational Research Institute of the University of California, San Diego, and which will focus this year on metabolic diseases.

Both of these meeting series have been very successful, and we are delighted for the opportunity to continue such productive partnerships.

In terms of the journal's content, we have received positive feedback on our features that identify the papers with the strongest impact on a given field, such as the one we published on reproduction this past November. You can therefore expect a couple of those specials during 2009. Additionally, we have envisioned a related project, the working title of which is “Six Questions,” or, simply, 6Q. 6Q will aim at fostering translational research in specific fields by identifying the obstacles that block the road to finding new therapies and by putting forward possible ways to work around them. We don't want to give away the whole plot by telling you more about the format and the disciplines we intend to cover just yet, but keep an eye out for the first 6Q, perhaps as early as April.

In view of our long-standing support of translational research, we are always open to new ways to show our support, and we were very pleased to receive an invitation from the Eureka Institute for Translational Medicine (see http://www.eurekainstitute.org) to join their efforts to train a new class of translational researcher. Their view is that one reason for the inefficiency of translational research is the shortage of people who have mastered all of its steps, from scientific idea to clinical trial design—dealing with regulatory agencies, raising funds from venture capital and protecting intellectual property. And those who have mastered them have often learned by the inefficient process of trial and error. Eureka's goal is to create a training program in which people interested in translational research can learn everything they need to know to successfully navigate the convoluted road from bench to bedside. We look forward to participating as part of the faculty of their Inaugural Certificate Program next May in Siracusa, Italy.

Above and beyond all of this, we will continue to improve the ways in which we deliver research results and their implications to our readers, adding a podcast, new sections within our News and Views, and more reviews and commentary. Ultimately, we want to make sure that if you care about translational research (as an author or a reader), you will think about Nature Medicine first. As always, we welcome and look forward to your feedback.

To finish, we want to express our appreciation to our reviewers and authors for their hard work and for believing in the journal, to the scientists who work so diligently to meet our editorial deadlines, to the journalists who contribute great stories to our News section and to all of you who read us. Without you, we would simply not have a journal.