The deployment of biomedical applications in a grid environment has started about three years ago in several European projects and national ini-tiatives. These applications have demonstrated that the grid paradigm was rele-vant to the needs of the biomedical community. They have also highlighted that this community had very specific requirements on middleware and needed fur-ther structuring in large collaborations in order to participate to the deployment of grid infrastructures in the coming years. In this paper, we propose several ar-eas where grid technology can today improve research and healthcare. A cru-cial issue is to maximize the cross fertilization among projects in the perspec-tive of an environment where data of medical interest can be stored and made easily available to the different actors of healthcare, the physicians, the health-care centres and administrations, and of course the citizens.