Straight talk with...Valery Danilenko. Interviewed by Gary Peach

Russian medicine is-at long last-undergoing a renaissance. The country's rocky economic ride following the collapse of the Soviet Union disrupted its research rubric and impoverished its healthcare system. Now, however, the nation's leadership is spearheading various initiatives to reverse the situation. One of them, the US-Russian Scientific Forum, established two years ago by a bilateral presidential commission, hopes to bring improvements by facilitating public-private research in biomedicine and innovative drugs. The Forum, which on the Russian side is represented by the country's Ministry of Health and Social Development and the Russian Academy of Sciences, among others, held its inaugural planning meeting in late April in Moscow. Valery Danilenko, who is helping to spearhead the effort and also leads the biotechnology division at the Vavilov Institute of General Genetics in Moscow, told Nature Medicine about the meeting and Russia's hopes for the Forum. The interview was conducted in Russian and translated by the interviewer, Gary Peach.