Cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes (type-II), and obesity are major health concerns in the U.S. and in other developed and developing regions around the world.  These chronic diseases are in many circumstances considered to be preventable via various facets of lifestyle.   Prominent among these lifestyle factors is the type and amounts of the foods eaten, particularly those foods of plant origin.  While there has been some success in efforts to breed plants for improved health-related attributes, these examples are remarkably limited in number and scope.  Given the profound physical, psychosocial and economic consequences of chronic diseases and the potential of food crops to meaningfully reduce chronic disease risk, we decided to challenge scientists in a broad array of disciplines to join forces in an effort to harness existing and emerging capabilities in agriculture and the biomedical sciences to reduce chronic disease prevalence.  We have coined the term “biomedical agriculture” to describe this transdisciplinary research effort.  This presentation will highlight promising examples of the discovery process being used to develop more healthful food crops, as well as underscore challenges being encountered in pursuing this strategy.  Topics to be covered include: the role of health profiling of a crop in designing a program of research,  exploitation of the biodiversity of crop varieties for identifying extremes in health characteristics, selection of model systems for evaluating health traits, and the use of “omics technologies” and traditional approaches to facilitate rapid characterization of traits of interest.  The ultimate goal of this effort is to define a discovery process that identifies traits that can be used by plant breeders to improve a crop's human health attributes.  It is critical that this be done in a manner that will be accepted within the agricultural community so that crops of interest become widely available to consumers. As the field of biomedical agriculture evolves, consumer are likely to be informed about currently unappreciated health benefits of existing food selections and to be offered new selections with improved disease prevention characteristics.  It is anticipated that future dietary recommendations will be targeted not only for specific food crops, but also for varieties within a crop.