Dr. Carolyn Lam:               Welcome to Circulation on the Run, your weekly podcast summary and backstage pass to the journal and its editors. I'm Dr. Carolyn Lam, Associate Editor from the National Heart Center, and Duke-National University of Singapore.                                                 We know that excessive sedentary time is bad in terms of health outcomes, but does it matter how that sedentary time is accrued, whether in short or long bouts? Today's feature paper gives us some answers. More soon, right after the summary of this week's journal.                                                 The first original paper in this week's journal provides insights into the mechanisms underlying neointima formation in arterial restenosis. Co-first authors, Dr. Cheng and Shi, corresponding author Dr. Li from Wuhan University in China, and their colleagues, performed an elegant series of experiments in which they demonstrated that interferon regulatory factor 4, or IRF4, which is a member of a family of key, innate, immune regulators known to play a role in cardiometabolic disease, actually protects arteries against neointima formation.                                                 They further probed the mechanism underlying this protective effect and found that IRF4 promoted the expression of Krüppel-like factor 4 by directly binding to its promoter. Genetic over-expression of Krüppel-like factor 4 in smooth muscle cells reversed the neointima promoting effect of IRF4 ablation. Whereas, ablation of Krüppel-like factor 4 abolished the protective function of IRF4, thus indicating that the protective effects of IRF4 against neointima formation were Krüppel-like factor 4 dependent.                                                 These findings suggest that the previously undiscovered IRF4 Krüppel-like factor 4 axis plays an important role in vascular proliferative pathology and thus may be a promising therapeutic target for the treatment of arterial restenosis.                                                 The next paper highlights that high-spacial resolution in gene expression signatures can reveal new regulators, genetic pathways, and transcription factors that are active in well-defined regions of the heart.                                                 Now we know that traditional genome-wide transcriptome analysis has been disadvantaged by the fact that the signals are derived from tissue homogenates. Thus, the authors of this current paper, including Co-First authors Dr. Lacraz and Junker, corresponding author Dr. Van Rooij from University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands used tomo-seq to obtain genome-wide gene expression signature with a high spacial resolution, spanning from the infarcted area to the remote areas to identify new regulators of cardiac remodeling.                                                 Using this technique, they identified SOX9 as a potent regulator of cardiac fibrosis. In vivo loss of SOX9 reduced the expression of many extracellular matrix genes, which coincided with a blended cardiac fibrotic response upon ischemic injury.                                                 These data therefore were able to unveil currently unknown relevance of SOX9 as a key regulator of cardiac fibrosis, thus underscoring that tomo-seq can be used to increase our mechanistic insights into cardiac remodeling, and to help guide the identification of novel therapeutic candidates.                                                 The next paper reports the primary results of the effect of ferric carboxymaltose on exercise capacity in patients with iron deficiency and chronic heart failure, or EFFECT-HF study, which is a randomized control trial of intravenous ferric carboxymaltose, compared to standard of care on the primary end point of change in peak Vo2 from baseline, to 24 weeks in patients with symptomatic, chronic heart failure with reduced ejection fraction and iron deficiency.