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