The lab put on a great showing at ATS. Presentations from Brody Mayoras, Jenn Baker, Kale Bongers, Katie Winner, Joe Metcalf, and Rishi Chanderraj. Also: 3 of the PI-TB abstract award winners were from the lab! (Jenn, Kale, and Brody)
The lab got together at the American Thoracic Society conference to celebrate everyone’s successful presentations.
Kale Bongers has been awarded an ATS abstract award, joining Jenn Baker and Brady Mayoras (below). Congrats Kale!
Kale Bongers
Robert Dickson was part of an ATS workshop on the use of bronchoscopy in the study of critically ill patients. The workshop report is now published in Annals of the American Thoracic Society.
Robert Dickson has been selected to join the 2023 class of Fellows of the European Respiratory Society. He will be inducted at the 2023 ERS International Congress in Milan in September.
“The Fellow of ERS (FERS) award recognises excellence from within the ERS membership by acknowledging outstanding contributions in research, education and clinical leadership. Those contributions, combined with the candidate’s previous research records (h-index), form the basis for induction into this prestigious group. Up to 50 Fellows are selected each year and recipients may use the designation ‘FERS’ following their name. FERS awardees are also inducted into an elite advisory board that will be called upon by the Society on various matters in future years.”
Now online: a Research Letter in Chest on the topic of lactate clearance in sepsis, led by medical student Reid McCallister and Rishi Chanderraj. This was a collaboration with Mike Sjoding and Mark Nuppnau.
In sepsis, we give a lot of weight to “lactate clearance” - whether or not we’re able to decrease a patient’s blood lactate level with resuscitation. It is recommended in Surviving Sepsis guidelines (“…we suggest guiding resuscitation to decrease serum lactate in patients with elevated lactate level, over not using serum lactate”) and has been used both as an enrollment criterion and a physiological endpoint in clinical trials. But lactate is a highly limited index of perfusion and response to resuscitation, and is quite confounded by comorbidities (like liver and kidney injury).
Using clinical data from 4,775 patients (with sepsis, an elevated lactate, and at least two lactate measurements), we asked if initial lactate clearance predicts 1) subsequent lactate trajectories and 2) patient prognosis. We found that the answer to #1 is “no, not well” and the answer the #2 is “not nearly as well as the confounding comorbidities.” Much of the prognostic utility of “failure to clear lactate” is actually due to confounding by liver failure.
This is Reid’s first first-author publication, and Rishi’s first senior-author publication. Congrats to both!
Reid McCallister
Rishi Chanderraj MD MS
A team from our lab, led by Kale Bongers, has published a new study in the Blue Journal demonstrating that the gut microbiome plays a major role in the body’s calibration of temperature both in sepsis and in health. This translational study leveraged clinical data from 13,000 hospitalized patients, rectal swabs from 118 hospitalized patients, and a series of murine experiments using antibiotic-treated, germ-free, and gnotobiotic mice. We found that the same bacterial family (Lachnospiraceae) explains variation in the temperature response of both humans and mice. These findings may help explain both why temperature trajectory is so variable (and prognostically important) in sepsis, as well as why human body temperature has been steadily declining since the 1860s.
This study has been featured in more than 50 news sites, including Newsweek.
Kale Bongers MD PhD
The NIH (NHLBI, NIGMS) plans on launching the APS Consortium, dedicated to intensely studying the underlying biology of ARDS, Pneumonia, and Sepsis. Robert Dickson partnered with Bob Hyzy and Hallie Prescott to lead the University of Michigan application, and we have just received word that we have been chosen to join the network.
The APS Consortium will longitudinally study 5,000 hospitalized patients with these conditions, both while they are admitted and following discharge. The University of Michigan team joined forces with Henry Ford Hospital, University of Cincinnati, and University of Chicago. They proposed a plan to investigate the role of gut and respiratory microbiota in explaining the biological heterogeneity that underlies these diseases.
The application was strengthened by contributions from numerous collaborators as well as support from the Weil Institute for Critical Care Research & Innovation.
Robert Dickson will be speaking at the Keystone Conference “From First Breath: Lung Development, Infection, Repair and Aging” in Snowbird, Utah on Tuesday, April 25. His talk will be on “The Microbial Ecology of the Respiratory System.”
Both Jenn Baker (Microbiology & Immunology PhD student) and Brody Mayoras (UM undergraduate working with Jenn) have been awarded Abstract Scholarships by the American Thoracic Society. Congrats to Jenn and Brody!
Jenn Baker
Brody Mayoras
Callie Drohan (first-year PCCM fellow at UM, soon to join the Dickson Lab), joined by Robert Dickson and Phil Molyneaux, has published an editorial in the Blue Journal titled “How to Understand a Revolution: Guts, Lungs, and Bronchiectasis.” They discuss a recent multi-omic study of gut and lung microbiota in bronchiectasis by Narayana et al: Microbial Dysregulation of the Gut-Lung Axis in Bronchiectasis.
They draw an analogy between the study of history (specifically, the American Revolution) and the study of respiratory microbiology. The team was proud of the AI-assisted image they generated, but regrettably it didn’t make the final cut.
Robert Dickson was part of a large team of experts who have developed and published the first definition of Immunocompromised Host Pneumonia (just published in Annals ATS).
Huge congrats to Reid McCallister, who just learned he’ll be performing his internship and residency (Internal Medicine) at the University of Colorado. Reid will receive superb clinical training, and will have loads of options to continue his research into the biology and clinical management of critical illness. Way to go, Reid!
Reid McCallister
Robert Dickson will be speaking on the topic of latent tuberculosis infections at the State of Michigan’s “World TB Day Conference” on March 24. The event will be held at the Hilton Garden Inn in Lansing.
Kale Bongers, along with Robert Dickson and Kathleen Stringer, just published a new editorial in the European Respiratory Journal on the role of the gut microbiome in ARDS. They discuss an exciting recent new study in ERJ by Wang et al: Gut microbiota-derived succinate aggravates acute lung injury after intestinal ischaemia/reperfusion in mice.
They discuss the various mechanisms by which gut bacteria may protect from - and promote - the pathogenesis of lung injury in critical illness. Congrats Kale!
Robert Dickson will be speaking at the annual conference of the Society of Critical Care Medicine in San Francisco at 11:00 on Saturday, January 21. He will speak on the topic of the microbiome’s role in ARDS.
Robert Dickson will be delivering a keynote address at the 2023 Microbiome Symposium at the University of Alabama at Birmingham on January 11. His talk will be titled “The gut and lung microbiome in critical illness.”
One of Robert Dickson’s roles is serving as Program Director of the Pulmonary & Critical Care Division’s T32 Training Program: Multidisciplinary Training Program in Lung Disease (T32HL007749). He and his T32 team recently received a perfect score (10!) on their renewal application. To celebrate, he brewed a T32-Hearted Ale, modeled (both in its brewing and label design) on Michigan’s own Bell’s Two-Hearted Ale, the best beer in America. The beer was distributed at the Division’s holiday party.
We celebrated the upcoming holidays, as well as Gisell’s return to Colombia. Cheers!
The lab had numerous reasons to celebrate (Rishi’s paper getting published on line, Jenn’s Novy award, Gisell joining us, Kale submitting his K08, Joe’s first publication, Katie passing Checkpoint 2, Piyush’s big news), so we got together this week to enjoy the beautiful Ann Arbor fall.
