David W Schmidtke
University of Texas at Dallas, TX·Biomedical Engineering
Ventricular assist devices (VADs) are implanted pumps that help a failing heart move blood. They have greatly improved survival for people with end-stage heart failure.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Microbiology & Immunology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
ventricular assist device
heart failure
device-associated infection
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Feb 2029
What they work on
- Measure pre-implant leukocyte profiles and plasma biomarkers in advanced heart failure patients and test whether these signs of a compromised inflammatory response predict infection after VAD implantation.
- Develop microfluidic assays, small fluid-handling chips, to measure how white blood cell profiles and function change after a ventricular assist device is implanted.
- Test whether VAD-related inflammation releases immature neutrophils and myeloid-derived suppressor cells, immune-dampening cells, from the bone marrow, creating cells that damage tissue but fail to fight microbes.
- Determine whether treating neutrophils from VAD patients with specialized pro-resolving lipid mediators (SPMs), lipids that help end inflammation, restores their antibacterial function.
More about the research
Yet 20–60% of VAD recipients develop infections, and the reason is not well understood. The puzzle is that these patients show persistent inflammation and activated neutrophils, the white blood cells that normally attack bacteria. That should strengthen defense against microbes, not weaken it. This project asks why the immune system of VAD patients fails to fight infection, and whether that failure can be predicted or reversed.
Why it matters
Infection is a frequent and serious complication for people with heart failure who rely on ventricular assist devices. Pre-surgery biomarkers could help identify which patients are most at risk. Bedside microfluidic tests of white blood cell function and lipid mediators that restore neutrophil activity could guide personalized therapies to lower infection rates. The findings could also help adjust VAD therapy to reduce damage to blood cells.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Zhongjun Wu
University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD·Biomedical Engineering
Characterize how high mechanical shear stress changes neutrophil structure, rolling and adhesion, and surface markers, and quantify how structural damage scales with stress levels found in VADs and ECMO.
Ginger Milne
University of Alabama at Birmingham, AL·Pharmacology
Identify how four specialized pro-resolving lipid mediators (RvE4, RvD1, RvD5 and maresin 2), molecules that help end inflammation, are chemically transformed using a laboratory model of human metabolism.
Yuncheng Du
University of Houston, TX·Engineering·Early-career
Develop machine learning methods that find the symptom "fingerprints" of faults directly from data, enabling real-time diagnosis of ventricular assist device problems such as thrombosis and suction.
The school
University of Texas at Dallas: 16 labs on PI Pages, $182M a year on research, 239 research doctorates a year.
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