Laurie Snyder
Duke University, NC·Medicine & Clinical Research
For people with end-stage lung disease, a lung transplant is the only treatment, but the weeks right after surgery are dangerous. Complications in that window shorten long-term survival and drive up the cost of an already expensive therapy.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Public Health & Epidemiology
Microbiology & Immunology
- Topics
lung transplantation
textbook outcome
primary graft dysfunction
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Test whether specific pretransplant clinical characteristics predict failure to achieve a lung transplant textbook outcome, defined as freedom from primary graft dysfunction, acute lung allograft dysfunction, renal failure and infection.
- Measure biological aging in the recipient's pretransplant immune system and in the explanted diseased lung to determine whether accelerated aging is lung-specific or a systemic process that transplant would not resolve.
- Build and validate a textbook outcome prediction model using iterative machine learning on the combined clinical and biological aging measures, producing a personalized perioperative risk estimate for individual transplant candidates.
- Enroll patients and contribute clinical data and biospecimens from four transplant centers under the Lung Transplant Consortium common protocol, adding roughly 200 or more patients annually.
More about the research
One way to measure success is the "textbook outcome": a patient who avoids the major early problems, which for lung transplant include primary graft dysfunction (the new lung failing to work properly at first), acute lung allograft dysfunction, kidney failure and infection. This group published the first textbook outcome definition for lung transplant from single-center data and found that failing to reach it was strongly linked to worse survival and higher health system costs. A follow-up analysis of 62 US centers found that the share of patients achieving a textbook outcome ranged from 27% to 72%, showing wide variability and room for improvement.
Why it matters
Candidates for lung transplant and their clinicians could get a personalized estimate of the risk of early post-operative complications, helping guide decisions about timing and perioperative care. Because the project looks for variables that can be modified, it may point to concrete ways to raise the share of patients achieving a complication-free course, which is tied to longer survival and lower costs for transplant programs.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Chitaru Kurihara
Northwestern University, IL·Medicine & Clinical Research
Determine whether integrated stress response activation of ATF4, a stress-induced gene regulator, is necessary for impaired alveolar epithelial repair after lung transplantation, using mouse transplant models.
Jonathan Singer
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Determine how sarcopenic obesity, sarcopenia and high body fat affect perioperative complications and patient-reported outcomes at 6 months in 803 lung transplant candidates, with body composition measured by bioelectrical impedance analysis.
Ilene Hollin
Temple University, PA·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Describe quality-of-life priorities and how they shape decisions among patients and caregivers at each phase of lung transplant, and among clinicians, using semi-structured interviews.
The school
Duke University: 61 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 417 research doctorates a year.
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