How does insufficient sleep duration, irregular timed sleep schedules, and poor sleep quality contribute to the pathophysiology of lung, heart and blood diseases?

What are informative and clinically relevant biomarkers of pulmonary hypertension (PH)?

Will sensitivity to the psychological aspects of obesity, including lifestyle priorities and motivations, improve the efficacy of long-term effectiveness of weight loss and obesity prevention interventions?

Infrastructure for performing research in rare diseases should be enhanced to allow efficient accrual to multicenter trials.

Continued and expanded support for the Cardiothoracic Surgical Trials Network (CTSN) and Pediatric Heart Network (PHN) is essential as both design, conduct, and analyze multiple, collaborative clinical trials that evaluate surgical interventions, and related management approaches for the treatment of cardiovascular disease.

To date both networks have reported on and developed a portfolio of studies which need continued... more »

Clinical research, especially randomized pharmaceutical clinical trials, poses many unique challenges compared to research in adult subjects. In pulmonary arterial hypertension, a disease characterized by high blood pressure of the lungs with increased pulmonary vascular resistance leading to right ventricular failure, there are 12 FDA-approved PAH-targeted therapies for adults. None of these medications are currently... more »

What innovative methodologies applicable to small cohorts and rare outcomes can better ensure the success of clinical and implementation studies in the rare diseases affecting heart, lung, blood, and sleep?

Clinical trials are at a crossroads. They are too expensive, take too long, and often can't recruit adequately. A critical challenge is to develop tools that can change the cost, time, and recruiting practices for clinical trials.

There is a need to optimize long-term cognitive and functional outcomes in the aging population during and after cardiothorasic surgery, including the development of simple, objective tools to enable risk stratification for vulnerability to neurocognitive deficit. First, cardiothoracic surgical trials and clinical studies should be more "age-representative" and reflect the increasing proportion of the aging population.... more »

A critical challenge is the need to bring together basic behavioral scientists interested in understanding human behavior at a fundamental level, including how and why people become motivated and capable of undertaking behavioral changes, with clinical researchers interested in developing and testing new strategies for tackling resistant behavioral problems such as obesity and non-adherence.

Although the NCRR and NIGMS used to have a mechanism to train new generation of clinical & translational scientists, this program was stopped. Why?

What is the possibility of other institutes to come up with the priority of funding resources in this regard?

Can we "reprogram" the immune system to improve outcomes of heart, lung, and hematopoietic cell transplants?

While NIAID is a major funder of immunology research, we are a major contributor to stem cell research. Our resources could be combined, where NIAID would support this approach for autoimmune diseases, and we would support work in tolerance for transplants.

If the NCI also wants to collaborate on co-stimulatory... more »

What are the best ways for the NHLBI to advance the evolving science of translating robust evidence into clinical practice domestically and globally? How to personalize broad research evidence for individual patients?
How to predict and evaluate the impact of evidence-based interventions?
How to identify implementation methods available in industry and elsewhere that work best and are most translatable in healthcare?... more »

What structural changes need to be implemented in the health-care community in order to support the use of genomic information in clinical trials and drug development for hematologic diseases?

Are the current methodologies for clinical trials still the best practices for conducting efficient clinical trials?