Translational medicine, which bridges scientific discovery to clinical experimentation for the development of novel pharmaceutical products, emerges as a critical step in the path to successful therapeutic innovation for biopharmaceutical companies.

The mouse is pivotal, as a model organism, in the translational medicine path, to turn genomic data and information that are accumulating with increasing speed, into critical knowledge to:

- understand disease mechanisms,
- identify and validate specific therapeutic targets and, possibly, biomarkers,
- validate selected intended indications of candidate drugs,
- identify drug candidates’ potential alternative or additional indications,
- identify the side effects of candidate drugs