The NHLBI SMARTT Program: A Novel Approach to Facilitate Translational Research for Heart, Lung and Blood Diseases.

The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), one of the 27 Institutes/Centers within the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has a strong interest in promoting translational research. This interest can be traced to its mission statement, which reads in part: “The NHLBI stimulates basic discoveries about the causes of disease, enables the translation of basic discoveries into clinical practice, fosters training and mentoring of emerging scientists and physicians, and communicates research advances to the public.” (www.

2015 proceedings of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute's State of the Science in Transfusion Medicine symposium.

On March 25 and 26, 2015, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute sponsored a meeting on the State of the Science in Transfusion Medicine on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) campus in Bethesda, Maryland, which was attended by a diverse group of 330 registrants. The meeting's goal was to identify important research questions that could be answered in the next 5 to 10 years and which would have the potential to transform the clinical practice of transfusion medicine. These questions could be addressed by basic, translational, and/or clinical research studies and were focused on four areas: the three "classical" transfusion products (i.

One size will never fit all: the future of research in pediatric transfusion medicine.

There is concern at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) and among transfusion medicine specialists regarding the small number of investigators and studies in the field of pediatric transfusion medicine (PTM). Accordingly, the objective of this article is to provide a snapshot of the clinical and translational PTM research considered to be of high priority by pediatricians, neonatologists, and transfusion medicine specialists. Included is a targeted review of three research areas of importance: (i) transfusion strategies, (ii) short- and long-term clinical consequences, and (iii) transfusion-transmitted infectious diseases.