The 8th Asia-Pacific Hepatology Society Symposium was held in Beijing National Convention Center from October 7 to 9, 2011, where domestic and foreign experts discussed “Translational Medicine: Clinical Immunology and Immunotherapy of Viral Hepatitis”. Translational medicine was formally proposed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2003, and since then, it has received increasingly widespread attention from the medical community in various countries. In China, translational medicine has become a major national policy in the field of biomedicine, and will be one of the core elements of the health care industry during the 12th Five-Year Plan. The goal of translational medicine is to eliminate the barrier between basic medicine and clinical medicine to the greatest extent possible, to shorten the process from laboratory to clinical application, to rapidly transform the results obtained from basic research into drugs or medical devices and equipment that can be used to treat patients, so that patients can directly and rapidly benefit from the results of basic research — this is the basic definition of translational medicine. Translational medicine is not simply about putting basic research results into the clinic; it also implies a shift in the entire medical paradigm. This new medical paradigm is based on prediction, prevention, early intervention and individualized treatment as the future direction of clinical medicine. During the conference, domestic and foreign hepatologists presented the progress of translational medicine in the field of liver disease: 1) establishing better cellular and animal models; 2) signaling pathways in the process of disease regression; 3) biological markers that can be used for diagnosis; 4) targets that are specific to the disease.