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Principal Investigator: Nuala Jennings Meyer
Organization: UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
Fiscal Year: 2024
Award: $955,499
Funding agency: National Heart Lung and Blood Institute
This R35 proposal is to support a robust translational research program focused on sepsis-associated acute
respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), explaining individual risk and characterizing the ARDS host immune
response in order to identify molecular traits that may respond differently to specific therapy. The year 2020
and the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic placed a global spotlight on sepsis-associated ARDS and its lack of
pharmacologic treatments, with over 400,000 American deaths. Even in non-pandemic years, however, ARDS
complicates approximately 10% of all intensive care unit admissions and impacts close to 200,000 Americans.
Mortality for ARDS has stubbornly exceeded 30%. I have used my translational science training to extend our
knowledge of individual factors and pathways that influence ARDS risk and resolution, use genomic tools to
infer which ARDS-associated plasma markers may be causal contributors to ARDS risk and mortality, and
deeply characterize the host response to COVID-19 ARDS. I have grown a research program that includes a
carefully phenotyped cohort of over 3,500 human subjects critically ill with sepsis, and curated biosamples at
multiple timepoints to facilitate genomic and molecular discoveries, while contributing to the career
development of multiple NHLBI-funded patient-oriented researchers. With the support of the R35, the Meyer
research program will focus on 5 complementary themes to improve the health of patients with and at risk for
sepsis-associated ARDS. Thematic area 1 concentrates upon understanding individual risk for ARDS and
ARDS mortality, which will utilize whole genome association, expression and protein quantitative trait locus
analysis, and genetic causal inference frameworks to evaluate inherited risks and identify which RNA and
plasma traits may be causal intermediates in ARDS. Area 2 addresses the host response to ARDS, using deep
immune profiling and integrated analyses to characterize and contrast the response to bacterial and viral
sepsis-associated ARDS. In later years, sterile ARDS will be compared to infectious ARDS, and the
contribution of activated T cells will be examined. Area 3 examines the interplay between ARDS and non-lung
organ injuries during sepsis, particularly acute kidney injury, delirium and cognitive injury, and shock and
circulatory dysfunction. We will identify DNA, RNA, plasma, and cytometric features specific to individual organ
failures and shared across multiple organ systems. The R35 program will also catalyze two new areas of
investigation for the Meyer lab. First, we will apply biomedical informatics techniques to integrate, visualize,
and analyze multiple data networks – clinical, genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, metabolomic, and cytometric
– to identify coordinated patterns of response and their association with ARDS outcome. We will also examine
the longitudinal host response to ARDS during recovery, testing for responses that predict or protect from post-
intensive care syndrome. An investment in our research program will advance the prevention and personalized
treatment of ARDS while fostering training and mentorship in lung health research.
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