NHLBI Strategic Visioning: setting an agenda together for the NHLBI of 2025.

The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) community has established a long legacy of research success, resulting in dramatic improvements in longevity and quality of life. To continually advance its mission of research that enhances public health, the NHLBI is embarking on a Strategic Visioning process to identify scientific priorities that will guide the institute's future directions in heart, lung, blood, and sleep (HLBS) research for next decade. The institute is using a digital crowdsourcing approach to engage its broad community on the scientific opportunities and challenges to research progress that could be addressed through activities and initiatives led by the NHLBI. The result of the Strategic Visioning process will be a complete understanding of the most pressing scientific questions and research barriers that the NHLBI can address today and for 5 to 10 years to come. The resulting scientific priorities will serve as a guide for resource allocation and will be regularly refreshed through an ongoing iterative and dynamic process of scientific engagement with the NHLBI community. Imagine a world where we are able to prevent and preempt the burden of cardiovascular, lung, and blood diseases; a world where we are able to capture the promise of personalized precision medicine, where each person receives the right treatment, tailored to his or her needs, at the right time. In this new world, what if we were able to realize a stroke-free generation of individuals living with sickle cell disease (SCD); what if we were able to eliminate health inequities (both domestic and global) with effective and rapid uptake of evidence-based practices and tools; and what if we could expand the frontiers of scientific knowledge and revolutionize how we diagnose, prevent, and treat disease by leveraging the power of big scientific data systems? This vision is not merely a collection of idle dreams; the boundless possibilities of this bold new world are well within our reach. The mission of the NHLBI is to enhance public health by transforming research discoveries in HLBS systems into improved disease prevention and treatment. The NHLBI is building upon a history of research excellence by embarking on a Strategic Visioning process to collectively identify the greatest unmet needs in HLBS research. Our aim is to engage all corners of the NHLBI community to identify the most compelling scientific questions of our time, questions that address pressing public health challenges, capitalize on major advances in technology, …