The challenges of biomedicine

The 21st century started in a quite unexpected manner: with a major economic crisis that is affecting most of the countries in the world. This setback has come at a time when we all had hoped to have found an enterprising path in the sphere of biomedicine that would lead us to implement in clinical practice all those scientific achievements that took place at the end of the 20th century. Will the crisis slow down medical development? Will the social paradigm of medicine change? Will science be able to find effective paths, and will the crisis become nothing more than a lever to encourage change? We aim to outline, through a series of reflections, the challenges that exist today in clinical medicine; to situate research and innovation in the centre of a network that enables us to reach them. The map may be diverse, the paths wide, but the aim is clear: to succeed in improving people’s quality of life.