Within the framework of its initiatives for the promotion of scientific progress and transatlantic relations, Aspen Institute Italia established an annual award in 2016 honoring research that is the result of collaboration between research organizations from Italy and the United States.
The eleventh edition of the Award was conferred upon a discovery regarding the mechanisms of stem cell generation in the laboratory, which opens up new perspectives for the treatment of genetic and oncological diseases. The scientific organizations featured in the study are the San Raffaele Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy in Milan and the Mount Sinai Hospital School of Medicine in New York.
The Ceremony provided an opportunity to debate the medicine of the future. Panelists reflected on research, prevention, and treatment. In Western countries, the future of medicine is conditioned by three factors. The first is the demographic winter and aging population, with a greater demand for care for degenerative pathologies, which entail significant social and family costs. The second is the consequent difficult sustainability of the welfare state. The third factor, which the meeting intended to highlight, is scientific progress, affected by major ethical challenges including those arising from the adoption of artificial intelligence.
On this point, mention was made of the AI implementation package approved on June 10, 2026 by the Council of Ministers, which places Italy at the forefront in Europe, with the first national regulatory framework fully consistent with the European AI Act. The approach is to promote innovation, but to govern it within an anthropocentric framework: AI can support decisions, services, training and competitiveness, but cannot.
replace human responsibility nor compress fundamental rights. For the application of AI to medical research, Italy has excellent scientific computing resources, supercomputers, which it is hoped can be a resource for collaboration with the United States, engines of a major push towards product industrialization. Bioinformatics, the intersection of biology and computational and interpretative capacity, will indeed be central to the medicine of the future and to therapy. The question remains as to what risks may arise from the potential use of data and products beyond therapeutic purposes.
Medicine tends to be more global in research and therapeutic approach (think, for example, of the borderless applications of telesurgery and telemedicine), fast (as shown by the speed with which Covid vaccines became available), predictive and personalized. Precision medicine will be tailored to the patient, with a potential return to holistic medicine. The hope is that scientific and technological progress can generate medicine not for the few and by the few.
On the production front, however, we are witnessing a de-globalization, a growing competition between Europe, the United States and China, as in the pharmaceutical sector. Europe is struggling: the value of the US pharmaceutical sector is double that of the European one, with a scale that creates an attraction effect due to the availability of both a better and greater supply of capital and a larger market. In the twenty-seven European healthcare systems, an average of six hundred days pass between the approval of a new drug and its availability on the market. An efficient system is therefore needed, one that overcomes geographical and bureaucratic fragmentation. Healthcare must be considered a strategic investment and not a cost. The lever of intellectual property must be used with strategic capability.
Another challenge is how to reduce and close the gap separating basic research from clinical research and therefore from its widespread application. For example, knowledge of how the brain works is still superficial. Mental health, diseases of aging and degenerative diseases do not yet have an adequate response, while treatments have a limited effect. There is a need to accelerate the link between basic research and the development of new therapies. As for basic research, it was proposed to invest in vaccine prototypes, building vaccine prototypes that can be quickly adapted to the pathologies or epidemics that will need to be addressed.
Despite recent limitations, international collaboration in the scientific field remains a cornerstone. Even in Europe, research still has a national character: although funded by the EU, a unified European research has not been created. Collaborating makes it possible to achieve, with the same resources, more important shared goals more quickly, strengthening relations between countries. Fifteen thousand Italian researchers work in the United States, and Italian professors at American universities have increased by an average of 6% per year over the last decade. These people are the most important network of “ambassadors” of “scientific diplomacy” that enhances relations between Italy and the United States, promoting new alliances and projects through the universal language of research. With the hope that the two shores of the Atlantic will be the two wings for scientific progress, health and shared prosperity.