Research

The number of elderly Americans hospitalized for sepsis has increased dramatically, placing significant financial strain on the nation's health care providers, according to a new federal study led by Emory critical care specialist Timothy Buchman, MD, PhD. The study is the first to analyze large amounts of Medicare data related to sepsis. The team's primary finding was that the huge rise in admissions came from patients who had sepsis when they arrived at the hospital.

For a study published in Immunity, senior author Mandy Ford, PhD, scientific director of the Emory Transplant Center, and other Emory transplant researchers probed the functions of Fc receptors on T cells in mice and also looked at markers from a kidney transplant clinical trial. The team identified a control mechanism the immune system uses to tamp down chronic inflammation, providing insight into how some people were able to stop taking immunosuppressive drugs after kidney transplant.

Emory vascular surgeon-scientist Luke P. Brewster, MD, PhD, MA, will apply two recent grants from the Department of Veterans Affairs to the Atlanta VA Medical Center to identifying promising rehabilitation and regenerative therapies for integration into novel treatments of patients with inadequate blood flow to their legs, termed peripheral arterial disease (PAD).

Emory general surgery residents Adriana Gamboa, MD, Michael Turgeon, MD, and Rachel Lee, MD, MSPH, and medical oncology fellow Ibrahim Sahin, MD, received Conquer Cancer Merit Awards from the Conquer Cancer Foundation of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) at the 2020 Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium in San Francisco.