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

Despite major advances in supportive care and tissue typing non relapse mortality rates for adults undergoing hematopoietic cell transplantation are still between 15-20 % at 2 years.
Lung injury and respiratory failure is a major causes of death after HCT.
Although the BMT-CTN has a focused agenda on GVHD, reduction of lung toxicities will be important to improve outcomes.
NHLBI should encourage researched from the... more »

How can the safety, dosing and benefits of existing therapies for sickle cell disease such as hydroxyurea, be optimized in order to increase its efficacy and improve patient adherence?

According to the ISHLT, more than 4,000 patients undergo a heart transplant each year, and almost 4,000 receive single or double lung transplants. Their prognosis depends heavily on the avoidance of rejection, which claims the majority of their lives. For heart transplant recipients, the median survival is 11 years, while for lung transplant recipients, it is approximately 5 years. The current most common anti-rejection... more »

What cellular and/or intracellular signaling events are activated in response to acute or chronic physical activity that lead to or explain improvements in health outcomes, prevention, or treatment of lung diseases?

Which metabolic signatures induced by exercise/physical activity would be predictive/ associated with poor lung disease prognosis?

End stage congestive heart failure (CHF) causes intensive lung remodeling beyond the type-2 pulmonary hypertension. CHF induced lung remodeling includes profound lung fibrosis, lung vascular remodeling and lung inflammation. Understanding CHF-induced lung remodeling is also critical to understand the right ventricular failure. However, this area is largely unstudied. Regulating CHF-induced lung remodeling and the underlying... more »

How can the structure and function lost in COPD be restored?

What molecular and cellular pathways explain the sex-specific differences in the prevalence, severity, and progression of lung diseases?

What is the relationship between exacerbations and progression of chronic lung diseases?

Maternal exposures during pregnancy have the potential to alter development and lead to lifelong susceptibility to disease. There is epidemiological evidence of this in the asthma field, where maternal smoking leads to increased asthma rates. However, the molecular mechanisms by which maternal exposures cause lung disease later in life are not known and the influence of in utero exposures on susceptibility to lung cancer,... more »

Critical Challenge

There are diverse diseases that share similar features. For example, many chronic airways diseases (chronic aspiration, ciliary dyskinesia, some COPD) "phenocopy" cystic fibrosis in terms of infectious agents, mucus clearance problems, progressive loss of lung function, etc. Use multiplatform "omics" approaches and Big Data bioinformatics to identify common nodes for therapeutic targeting. Other examples: emphysema and... more »

Why can’t we improve outcomes following acute lung injury. A half century of ICU interventions have resulted in only incremental improvements in survival and morbidity following acute lung injury. While we have pursued innumerable strategies for decreasing ventilator associated exacerbation of lung injury, we have failed to identify treatable common or selective pathways from the initial injury that can be targeted post... more »

Can a multipronged approach to reversing/repairing scar tissue in pulmonary fibrosis be deployed as soon as possible?

Critical Challenge