Recent Research and Future Directions synthesises the latest high-impact studies, emerging technologies and translational advances that will shape pediatric and neonatal care in the coming decade. The session is structured for clinician-scientists, early-career investigators, research funders and translational teams who need a concise, evidence-forward view of priority areas: precision medicine, gene and cell therapies, digital biomarkers, novel vaccine platforms, and implementation science approaches that accelerate uptake. Speakers will present late-breaking trial results, meta-analyses with practice-changing implications, and roadmaps for bringing bench discoveries into pragmatic clinical trials. Sessions will also discuss methodological advances—adaptive platform trials, pragmatic registry-embedded studies and real-world evidence generation—to enable more rapid, representative and generalisable pediatric research.

Emerging-topic panels will highlight the scientific agenda: microbiome-modulating interventions in early life, novel neuroprotective agents for neonatal brain injury, point-of-care genomic tools, and scalable interventions to close global equity gaps. Workshops will offer grant-writing clinics, reproducible-research toolkits, and guidance on building collaborative networks that share protocol templates, common data models and harmonised outcomes to accelerate multi-centre work. Ethical and regulatory sessions will address pediatric-specific trial design constraints, assent/consent innovations for minors, and post-approval evidence generation for high-cost therapies.

Attendees will leave with a curated “research roadmap” summarising priority questions, recommended study designs, data sources for secondary analyses, and potential funding mechanisms—practical guidance for translating research ideas into fundable, implementable projects.