Is "translational research" reshaping health policy ?

Biomedical research is an area of fast evolving development. Although biomedical research occurs in internationally nested research laboratories, application development occurs in local settings, such as hospitals, which are central instruments for health policies. Much translation work occurs to build new forms of cooperation between biomedical researchers and medical doctors. The first group works in an international competitive environment, acting as research entrepreneurs with connection to the pharmaceutical industry in the logics of "open innovation". Members of the second group are embedded in hospital systems, within a web of constrains, being accountable as well to their patients as to their managers, and to their professional constrains which are most of the time defined within specific institutions at national level, in close relation to public health authorities. These links at micro-meso-macro levels between medics and their environment are put under constrains by biomedical innovations (as was shown in Europe during the controversy around the breast cancer products from Myriad Genetics).
In order to organise new forms of cooperation and to dismantle frontiers between the "bench world" and the "bed world", a new concept was put at the fore : "translational research" which is supporting new forms of cooperation "from bench to bed" with all associated partners, ensuring enrolment of the individual patient and the policy makers. Starting with the presentation of the new science production regime in French speaking Belgium, the paper proposes to deconstruct the conditions of emergence of the new instruments of science production in biomedical research to understand institutional reorganisation and new power balances.