Biological factors & products

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Translational Science Benefits

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Clinical

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Community

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Economic

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Policy

Clinical & medical benefits (Tools & products)

Definition

Biological substances used to indicate, diagnose, prevent, or treat diseases or medical conditions. Examples include vaccines, blood or blood components, gene therapy, tissues, and protein therapies such as antibodies.

Rationale

By its definition, biological factors and products play important roles in each of the translational stages. Biological products are especially critical to advance research for a variety of health conditions for which no treatment is currently available.

Guidance

Advice from authors on searching for information:

The use of biological factors and products may change as biological substances or related procedures are newly identified or modified. Consider staying abreast of the best practices as best as possible.

Resources & Data

Organizations, repositories, websites, and other sources where you can find more information:

Local

General

  • Biological Databases for Human Research. Research article by Zou D, Ma L,  Yu J,J and Zhang Z, 2015, compiling and describing human-related biological databases.
  • PubMed/MEDLINE. PubMed provides free access to MEDLINE, the NLM database of indexed citations and abstracts to medical, nursing, dental, veterinary, health care, and preclinical sciences journal articles. See PubMed Help for guidance.
  • U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA). A list of licensed biological products for which they have supporting documents.

Data Limitations

Challenges you may encounter while searching for information:

Due to the personal nature of biological data, some of the data may be available if de-identified, or otherwise unavailable.

Publications

Articles, books, and other publications in translational science using the indicator:

Case Studies

Man with sinus pain at the doctor.

Preventing and Treating Invasive Fungal Sinusitis

By ICTS and Washington University in St. Louis

Identifying risk factors of a rare but fatal sinus infection to improve prevention and treatment efforts