National Institutes of Health Awards VCURES Grant to Study Microcirculatory Response to Hemorrhage

The National Institutes of Health and its National Heart Lung and Blood Institute have awarded VCURES a 1.9 million dollar four-year grant to study the microvascular response to hemorrhagic shock. The grant entitled Microvascular Response to Hemorrhagic Shock and Resuscitation will examine oxygen and nitric oxide transport of the body's microcirculation in the setting of severe hemorrhage and resuscitation.

The grant is led by Senior VCURES Fellow Roland Pittman PhD who is considered one of the world's foremost authorities in the study of microcirculatory oxygen transport. The grant will assist VCURES in understanding why and how some victims of traumatic shock are able to survive, while others die despite no difference in injury. It will also provide insight into how commonly used and new resuscitation fluids either improve or worsen survival. Dr. Pittman states “For years clinicians have been perplexed as to why many patients with hemorrhagic shock do not respond to conventional aggressive treatment. We believe the answer may lie at the level of the microcirculation, which is where oxygen is transported from the blood stream into organ tissues. We are in essence viewing the microcirculation as an organ system itself in need of monitoring and resuscitation.”

A unique aspect of this effort is a partnership with Dr. Aleksander Popel who is director of the Physiologic Mechanics and Transport Laboratory ( http://www.bme.jhu.edu/%7Eapopel/index.html ) at Johns Hopkins University . Dr. Popel will lead an effort to computationally model the microvascular oxygen and nitric oxide transport data produced by VCURES. Drs Pittman and Popel have collaborated in the past on computational modeling of microvascular oxygen transport. Computational modeling in this grant will provide investigators with insights into mechanisms and responses to injury as well as potential treatments.

Team members include:

Roland Pittman, PhD: Principal Investigator, Senior VCURES Fellow: Professor of Physiology, Emergency Medicine, and Biomedical Engineering

Ivo Torres Filho, MD, PhD: Co-Principal Investigator: Senior VCURES Fellow and Associate Professor Anesthesiology, Physiology, and Emergency Medicine

R. Wayne Barbee, PhD: Senior VCURES Fellow and Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine and Physiology

Aleksander Golub, PhD: VCURES Fellow and Associate Professor of Physiology

Aleksander Popel, PhD: Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University

Kevin Ward, MD: VCURES Associate Director: Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine and Physiology

Drs. Pittman, Golub and Torres have pioneered many important techniques in the study of the microcirculation, which allows examination of how oxygen is transported from red blood cells out of blood vessels and into tissues at a microscopic level. This project is part of the VCURES Operation Purple Heart combat casualty care program ( http://www.vcu.edu/vcures/purpleheart.htm ). It is hoped that much of the information gained from this study will assist in developing new means of treating severely injured U.S. Military service men and women

For more information please contact Dr. Roland Pittman at pittman@mail2.vcu.edu .