Mechanics and Mechanisms of Pulmonary Hypertension — Conference Summary and Translational Perspectives

The imagination has made more discoveries than the eye To catch an imagination of the future of pulmonary hypertension was exactly the spirit of the 55 th ASPEN lung Conference. Basic scientists, pre‐clinicians, clinicians and pharma joined together to achieve one goal—to combine creativity and inventiveness in a battle against a deadly disease. Summarizing this conference on “Mechanics and Mechanisms of Pulmonary Hypertension” is challenging in several aspects: To extract key novel findings from 12 state‐of‐the‐art lectures, 25 oral presentations, 56 posters along with the integration of own data on discussed topics, to include hundreds of important questions, answers and discussion raised during the conference, to provide the line of thinking for the next 5–10 years of pulmonary hypertension (PH) research development and to focus equally well on both basic and translational research. Kurt Stenmark and Todd Bull, who chaired the conference, intensified this challenge several‐fold by selecting a plethora of topics ranging from development of cardiopulmonary systems to pathogenesis of right ventricular failure, mechanics of right ventricle‐pulmonary artery coupling to genomics and from understanding metabolic aspects to developing therapies for PH. With that, need not say, but a special admiration and thanks to the conference chairs for assembling such outstanding state‐of‐the‐art speakers, for clustering the presentations logically and for leading lively and engaging discussions. Although it may look fragmentary, we would like to divide the conference summary into four major conceptual realms: The pulmonary vasculature in PH; right heart in PH; individualized approach‐ personalized medicine; and beyond PH‐vascular abnormalities in COPD. ‐ Joseph Joubert