We review the latest trends and major developments in translational bioinformatics in the year 2011-2012. Our emphasis is on highlighting the key events in the field and pointing at promising research areas for the future. The key take-home points are: • Translational informatics is ready to revolutionize human health and healthcare using large-scale measurements on individuals. • Data-centric approaches that compute on massive amounts of data (often called "Big Data") to discover patterns and to make clinically relevant predictions will gain adoption. • Research that bridges the latest multimodal measurement technologies with large amounts of electronic healthcare data is increasing; and is where new breakthroughs will occur.