Destiny Hooper
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
When a large artery in the brain is blocked, doctors can now pull the clot out mechanically, a procedure called endovascular thrombectomy. Even so, 54% of these patients die or are left severely disabled, because restoring blood flow does not stop the molecular cascade that keeps killing neurons afterward.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Neuroscience
Genetics
- Topics
ischemic stroke
large vessel occlusion
endovascular thrombectomy
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2031
What they work on
- Collect 40 paired arterial blood samples during endovascular thrombectomy, one from the femoral artery before the clot and one from beyond the occluded cerebral vessel via microcatheter, to sample blood adjacent to actively ischemic brain tissue.
- Define the gene expression profiles of individual cells in post-thrombus versus pre-thrombus arterial blood using single-cell RNA sequencing, testing whether the ischemic milieu differs from peripheral circulation.
- Determine whether a distinctive post-thrombus gene expression signature is associated with neurologic improvement or deterioration in patients with large vessel occlusion stroke.
- Evaluate the drug target potential of the identified gene expression signatures using network-based analyses and bioinformatics, prioritizing candidates for cerebroprotection in humans.
More about the research
Decades of work in cell cultures and animals have named more than 1,000 candidate drug targets for protecting the brain, and none has succeeded in patients, raising the question of whether those models represent human stroke at all. This project takes a different route: sample blood from inside the blocked human brain artery while the stroke is happening, and look there for targets.
Why it matters
Patients with strokes from large vessel blockage still face high rates of death and disability even after a successful clot removal, and clinicians have no treatment that protects brain tissue itself. By reading gene activity in blood drawn from inside the blocked artery in living patients, this work could identify cerebroprotective drug targets that are grounded in human biology rather than animal models, and the shared dataset may help others pursue the same targets.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Christopher G. Favilla
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Validate an optical algorithm for detecting large vessel occlusion by performing a 70-second speckle contrast optical spectroscopy blood flow scan on consecutive patients evaluated for acute stroke within 24 hours at three emergency departments, with urgent vascular imaging as the gold standard.
Laura Hansen
Emory University, GA·Physiology
Test whether muscle satellite cells are required for exercise-driven recovery of blood flow, using a mouse exercise preconditioning model in which satellite cells are selectively ablated.
Cameron Mccarthy
University of South Carolina-Columbia, SC·Physiology
Test whether loss of OGT, the enzyme that adds O-GlcNAc sugar tags to proteins, protects parenchymal arterioles from dysfunction before stroke in mice made diabetic with a high-fat diet and low-dose streptozotocin.
The school
Washington University in St Louis: 97 labs on PI Pages, $1.2B a year on research, 365 research doctorates a year.
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