Gaps in the implementation of effective interventions impact nearly all cancer prevention and control strategies in the US including Massachusetts. To close these implementation gaps, evidence-based interventions must be rapidly and equitably implemented in settings serving racially, ethnically, socioeconomically, and geographically diverse populations. This paper provides a brief overview of The Implementation Science Center for Cancer Control Equity (ISCCCE) and describes how we have operationalized our commitment to a robust community-engaged center that aims to close these gaps. We describe how ISCCCE is organized and how the principles of community-engaged research are embedded across the center. Principles of community engagement have been operationalized across all components of ISCCCE. We have intentionally integrated these principles throughout all structures and processes and have developed evaluation strategies to assess whether the quality of our partnerships reflects the principles. ISCCCE is a comprehensive community-engaged infrastructure for studying efficient, pragmatic, and equity-focused implementation and adaptation strategies for cancer prevention in historically and currently disadvantaged communities with built-in methods to evaluate the quality of community engagement. This engaged research center is designed to maximize the impact and relevance of implementation research on cancer control in community health centers.

Effective stakeholder interviewing is a critical component of a design process. However, interviewing is a complex skill that is difficult for novice designers to learn and incorporate into their design practices. Few studies have investigated how novice designers apply recommended practices for interviewing stakeholders during the development of product requirements. In this research, we studied how novice designers elicited information to inform the development of product requirements during stakeholder interviews. Results included the establishment of a coding methodology developed from a systematic literature review of recommended interviewing practices that was used to reliably evaluate the use of recommended practices in novice designers’ interviews. A correlation existed between the use of recommended practices and the extent to which information gathered from interviews was incorporated into the requirements. Additionally, specific recommended practices, such as encouraging deep thinking and being flexible and opportunistic, differentiated performance among novice designers. The coding methodology could be adapted to guide the development of stakeholder interview protocols and assessment of design interview skills.

Cu-doping and crystallographic site occupations within the half-Heusler (HH) TiNiSn, a promising thermoelectric material, have been examined by atom probe tomography. In particular, this investigation aims to better understand the influence of atom probe analysis conditions on the measured chemical composition. Under a voltage-pulsing mode, atomic planes are clearly resolved and suggest an arrangement of elements in-line with the expected HH (F-43m space group) crystal structure. The Cu dopant is also distributed uniformly throughout the bulk material. For operation under laser-pulsed modes, the returned composition is highly dependent on the selected laser energy, with high energies resulting in the measurement of excessively high absolute Ti counts at the expense of Sn and in particular Ni. High laser energies also appear to be correlated with the detection of a high fraction of partial hits, indicating nonideal evaporation behavior. The possible mechanisms for these trends are discussed, along with suggestions for optimal analysis conditions for these and similar thermoelectric materials.

Sensing of nutrients by chemosensory cells in the gastrointestinal tract plays a key role in transmitting food-related signals, linking information about the composition of ingested foods to digestive processes. In recent years, a number of G protein-coupled receptors (GPCR) responsive to a range of nutrients have been identified. Many are localised to intestinal enteroendocrine (chemosensory) cells, promoting hormonal and neuronal signalling locally, centrally and to the periphery. The field of gut sensory systems is relatively new and still evolving. Despite huge interest in these nutrient-sensing GPCR, both as sensors for nutritional status and targets for preventing the development of metabolic diseases, major challenges remain to be resolved. However, the gut expressed sweet taste receptor, resident in L-enteroendocrine cells and responsive to dietary sweetener additives, has already been successfully explored and utilised as a therapeutic target, treating weaning-related disorders in young animals. In addition to sensing nutrients, many GPCR are targets for drugs used in clinical practice. As such these receptors, in particular those expressed in L-cells, are currently being assessed as potential new pathways for treating diabetes and obesity. Furthermore, growing recognition of gut chemosensing of microbial-produced SCFA acids has led further attention to the association between nutrition and development of chronic disorders focusing on the relationship between nutrients, gut microbiota and health. The central importance of gut nutrient sensing in the control of gastrointestinal physiology, health promotion and gut–brain communication offers promise that further therapeutic successes and nutritional recommendations will arise from research in this area.

Antibody-mediated rejection is a major clinical challenge that limits graft survival. Various modalities of treatment have been reported in small studies in paediatric heart recipients. A novel approach is to use complement-inhibiting agents, such as eculizumab, which inhibits cleavage of C5 to C5a thereby limiting the formation of membrane attack complex and terminal complement-mediated injury of tissue-bound antibodies. This medical modality of treatment has theoretical advantages but the collective experience in its use in the solid organ transplant community remains small. We add to this experience by combining 14 cases from 6 paediatric heart centres in this descriptive study.

Reflection is an important component in design skill development that helps designers better understand their design problem, develop better solutions, and improve their design approaches. This study explored the information that a student design team reflected on as part of a needs finding experience and the outcomes from these reflections. During the needs finding experience, the team exhibited reflection-in- action behavior as they used available data to form and iterate on explanatory hypotheses about potential community needs. After the needs finding experience, the team exhibited reflection-on-action behavior as they drew connections between their interview approaches and stakeholder responses and discussed changes they might make in the future. The team also identified situations where contextual factors of the stakeholder impacted their interviews, but during these reflections did not indicate how they might adapt their approaches to account for such factors in the future. These findings show that student designers can use reflection as a tool to improve their needs finding process but would benefit from pedagogical structures that might help them reflect more effectively.

Returning genomic research results to family members raises complex questions. Genomic research on life-limiting conditions such as cancer, and research involving storage and reanalysis of data and specimens long into the future, makes these questions pressing. This author group, funded by an NIH grant, published consensus recommendations presenting a framework. This follow-up paper offers concrete guidance and tools for implementation. The group collected and analyzed relevant documents and guidance, including tools from the Clinical Sequencing Exploratory Research (CSER) Consortium. The authors then negotiated a consensus toolkit of processes and documents. That toolkit offers sample consent and notification documents plus decision flow-charts to address return of results to family of living and deceased participants, in adult and pediatric research. Core concerns are eliciting participant preferences on sharing results with family and on choice of a representative to make decisions about sharing after participant death.

The debate about how to manage individual research results and incidental findings in genetic and genomic research has focused primarily on what information, if any, to offer back to research participants. However, increasing controversy surrounds the question of whether researchers have any responsibility to offer a participant’s results (defined here to include both individual research results and incidental findings) to the participant’s relatives, including after the participant’s death. This question arises in multiple contexts, including when researchers discover a result with potentially important health implications for genetic relatives, when a participant’s relatives ask a researcher whether any research results about the participant have implications for their own health or reproductive planning, when a participant’s relative asks whether any of the participant’s results have implications for a child’s health, and when the participant is deceased and the participant’s relatives seek information about the participant’s genetic results in order to address their own health or reproductive concerns.

Heart transplantation offers excellent survival benefit to children with end-stage heart failure. With its success, the number of potential recipients continues to exceed the number of available donors. Developing strategies to safely increase donor utilisation is crucial to decreasing wait-list mortality. A new paediatric heart allocation policy is set to be implemented with the goal of prioritising the most urgent listed candidates. Owing to excellent outcomes of ABO-incompatible heart transplantation, the sickest infants will soon receive priority for heart offers irrespective of blood group. Allosensitisation poses unique challenges within the paediatric population; ongoing multi-centre studies are poised to refine our understanding of key risk factors and optimal treatment strategies. Biomarkers for acute cellular rejection, such as donor-specific cell-free DNA, and cardiac allograft vasculopathy, such as VEGF-A, may lead to a decreased need for invasive screening. Ultimately, well-designed and executed randomised control trials of post-transplant immunosuppression are required to improve long-term outcomes after paediatric heart transplantation.

In the United States alone, ∼14,000 children are hospitalised annually with acute heart failure. The science and art of caring for these patients continues to evolve. The International Pediatric Heart Failure Summit of Johns Hopkins All Children’s Heart Institute was held on February 4 and 5, 2015. The 2015 International Pediatric Heart Failure Summit of Johns Hopkins All Children’s Heart Institute was funded through the Andrews/Daicoff Cardiovascular Program Endowment, a philanthropic collaboration between All Children’s Hospital and the Morsani College of Medicine at the University of South Florida (USF). Sponsored by All Children’s Hospital Andrews/Daicoff Cardiovascular Program, the International Pediatric Heart Failure Summit assembled leaders in clinical and scientific disciplines related to paediatric heart failure and created a multi-disciplinary “think-tank”. The purpose of this manuscript is to summarise the lessons from the 2015 International Pediatric Heart Failure Summit of Johns Hopkins All Children’s Heart Institute, to describe the “state of the art” of the treatment of paediatric cardiac failure, and to discuss future directions for research in the domain of paediatric cardiac failure.