Two descriptions of translational research originally were defined by the Institute of Medicine’s Clinical Research Roundtable, which described “translational blocks” in the clinical research enterprise. Some now label these as T1 and T2. Two other stages, T3 and T4, have since been added to the scheme.

The roundtable described T1 as “the transfer of new understandings of disease mechanisms gained in the laboratory into the development of new methods for diagnosis, therapy, and prevention and their first testing in humans”¹.   The roundtable defined T2 as, “the translation of results from clinical studies into everyday clinical practice and health decision making”¹.

Others have suggested T3 as the task of discovering "ways to move these findings into the daily care of patient(s),"² while T4 has been associated with the challenge of "moving scientific knowledge into the public sector and thereby changing people’s everyday lives..."²