Introduction: According to the National Institute of Health (NIH) it is estimated that 80 to 90 percent of potential therapeutics in preclinical testing runs into obstacles that prevent them from being translated to the clinical phase. One of the main reasons is difficulties in developing and sustaining collaborations between basic scientists and clinicians. Translational research based on stem cell therapy, by its nature, crosses boundaries between basic science and clinical application. Crossing these boundaries contributes directly to overcoming challenges to engage basic scientists working on stem cell science in clinical research and practice. The aim of this qualitative study was to identify obstacles in application of basic stem cell science discoveries in opinion of Iranian scientists and clinicians. Materials and Methods: Sixteen experts in stem cell science and/or specialists in different clinical fields, working as distinguished academic members at universities and research centers of Mashhad, Northeastern Iran, were selected by purposive sampling method. Each deep interview was recorded with the permission of the interviewee and converted to text. Thematic analysis with open coding was done using MAXQDA ver. 10 software and axial codes were classified based on factors related to inefficiencies of basic stem cell researches. Results and Conclusion: A content analysis identified eight themes and 21 subthemes that described the participants\\\\\\\' opinions on the major drawbacks of translational medicine in Iran. The major themes were: Insufficiency of clinical trials regarding stem cells; unidentified ethical and legal concerns in different steps of translation; poor level of understanding each other between basic scientists and clinicians or lack of common language between them; differences between their professional environments, and heterogeneous areas of expertise; and different end-points in their work. This creates considerable problems of communication. We also discuss here the possible ways to overcome the obstacles by providing suggestions that may enable this collaboration and highlight strategies to improve the effective communication. Some of them are as below: governmental research investments and academic and industrial grants should involve both groups in benefits and responsibilities of translational research and must be increased in amount; it is recommended to admit medical students who have B.Sc. degree, as this is considered as the golden period to lay the basis for knowledge based researches and that the efforts to entice admitted medical students and residents to do research are too little too late and should be up scaled; more emphasize and priorities should be allocated to MD/PhD programs to fill the gap of understanding; in certain fields the regular MD/PhD trend could be reversed by introducing of PhD/MD or encouraging physicians with different specialties to enroll PhD degree or fellowship programs for cell therapy. Some other suggestions in the article include ways for elimination of the barriers exists in translational research. It is regarded as a starting point to encourage debate on this issue.

Keywords