Strategic Goals and Objectives

Strategic Goals

The strategic goals cut across the Institute’s heart, lung, blood, and sleep (HLBS) research portfolio and are rooted in a desire to understand and promote health and resilience, stimulate discoveries in the causes of disease, enable the translation of discoveries from basic research into clinical practice, and foster training and mentoring of emerging scientists and physicians.

Understand Human Biology

To expand knowledge of the molecular, cellular, and physiological mechanisms governing the normal function of HLBS systems as essential elements for sustaining human health.

Reduce Human Disease

To extend our knowledge of the pathobiology of HLBS disorders and enable clinical investigations that advance the prediction, prevention, preemption, treatment, and cures of human diseases.

Develop Workforce and Resources

To enable and develop a diverse biomedical workforce equipped with the essential research resources to pursue emerging opportunities in science.

Advance Translational Research

To facilitate innovation and accelerate research translation across the entire research spectrum, bridging basic to clinical, clinical to practice, and population to health impact.

Overarching Objectives

The eight objectives provide an organizing framework for the NHLBI Research Priorities. The objectives reflect one or more of the strategic goals. Over the next decade, these objectives will serve as the NHLBI's entire research portfolio, the strategic research priorities corresponding to the objectives will play a substantial role in helping the NHLBI to set, and periodically refine, a research agenda and priorities for the next decade.

Click below for more information on each objective.

  1. Understand normal biological function and resilience
  2. Investigate newly discovered pathobiological mechanisms important to the onset and progression of heart, lung, and blood diseases and sleep disorders
  3. Investigate factors that account for differences in health status among populations
  4. Identify factors that account for individual differences in pathobiology and in responses to treatments
  5. Develop and optimize novel diagnostic and therapeutic strategies to prevent, treat, and cure heart, lung, and blood diseases and sleep disorders
  6. Optimize clinical and implementation research to improve health and reduce disease
  7. Leverage emerging opportunities in data science to open new frontiers in research on heart, lung, and blood diseases and sleep disorders
  8. Further develop and sustain a scientific workforce capable of accomplishing NHLBI’s mission