Aaron Trammell
Emory University, GA·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
High blood pressure in the lung arteries, called pulmonary hypertension, is common in people with chronic lung disease and makes breathing harder and death more likely. This form is classified as Group 3 pulmonary hypertension, and it has no approved direct treatment: drugs that widen blood vessels, which help other forms of the disease, have failed in these patients.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Physiology
Pharmacology
- Topics
pulmonary hypertension
chronic lung disease
pulmonary vascular remodeling
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Compare glycolytic and mitochondrial energy production in freshly isolated platelets from patients with chronic lung disease and pulmonary hypertension, patients with chronic lung disease alone, and healthy controls, in a cross-sectional study.
- Test whether treating patient platelets outside the body with pioglitazone, a thiazolidinedione that activates the metabolic regulator PPARγ, improves their bioenergetic function.
- Determine in a phase 2 randomized cross-over trial whether pioglitazone versus placebo improves mitochondrial energy production in patients with chronic lung disease-associated pulmonary hypertension, with safety and disease efficacy as secondary outcomes.
- Develop expertise in cellular metabolic phenotyping of human samples and in conducting mechanistically targeted prospective trials in pulmonary vascular disease.
More about the research
That failure suggests the problem is not mainly constricted vessels. Current evidence points instead to remodeling, in which cells of the pulmonary blood vessels proliferate too readily and resist the normal signals to die, progressively thickening the vessel walls. Altered mitochondrial energy metabolism, how cells generate ATP, appears to drive that remodeling and has not been exploited as a treatment target.
Why it matters
Pulmonary hypertension affects more than 1.5 million US adults, becomes more common with age, and when it arises from chronic lung disease there is no direct therapy available. Measuring energy metabolism in platelets from a simple blood draw could provide an accessible marker of this disease, and testing pioglitazone, an already-approved diabetes drug, could show whether correcting metabolic defects is a viable treatment route for these patients.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Roberto Machado
University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD·Medicine & Clinical Research
Define how NAMPT, the enzyme that makes the metabolic signaling molecule NAD, controls metabolic reprogramming in pulmonary artery endothelial cells during the pulmonary hypertension response.
Peter Leary
University of Washington, WA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test in a Phase 2, single-center, randomized placebo-controlled trial whether 24 weeks of valsartan, an angiotensin receptor blocker, is safe and improves six-minute walk distance in adults with pulmonary arterial hypertension.
Yuanjun Shen
Binghamton University, NY·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Examine how Vps34, an enzyme that drives smooth muscle overgrowth, is activated in PAH lung arteries through Akt-dependent loss of phosphorylation at Ser164, including candidate phosphatases identified by computer analysis.
The school
Emory University: 70 labs on PI Pages, $1.2B a year on research, 286 research doctorates a year.
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