Eudorah Vital
BME PhD Proposal Presentation
Date: 2023-07-11
Time: 11:00AM-1:00PM
Location / Meeting Link: Kendeda 230 / https://zoom.us/j/93672117534
Committee Members:
Wilbur Lam, MD, PhD (Advisor) David Bark, PhD Cheryl Maier, MD, PhD David Myers, PhD William Robert Taylor, MD, PhD
Title: Rheological Insights into Sickle Cell Disease: Characterizing Arterial Hemolysis and Providing Translational Tools for Clinical Phenotyping
Abstract:
Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) is a chronic and debilitating hematologic disease that predominately affects black and brown people globally. While therapeutic options have significantly reduced mortality rates for those with access to them, the burden of morbidity for most patients remains high. SCD has been extensively characterized in venous and microvascular vessels, where the dynamic process of red blood cell sickling occurs and persists due to oxygen depletion. However, the mechanism by which sickling dynamics initiate a cascade of events that give rise to altered rheological patterns that eventually disrupt arterial health remains unclear. Although SCD pathology, like stroke, occurs primarily at the arterial level, the pathological and rheological patterns within this domain are less understood due to the lack of convenient tools to investigate SCD in the context of arterial flow. While most patients experience some form of arterial disease downstream of these rheological alterations, patient symptomology, and disease progression vary greatly. To that end, there are no translational tools that capture these flow differences in a single assay integrating the key contributing factors to patient rheology such as coagulability, RBC deformability, and platelet activation for use at the point-of-care to predict, assess, and monitor disease progression. My thesis work assesses SCD rheology to provide 1) a mechanistic explanation for widespread arterial disease in patients with SCD using a bench-top paradigm and 2) a functional multiplexed paper-based clinical tool to capture, assess, and monitor patient-specific rheological profiles which can enable clinical phenotyping. These results together will provide simple methods for evaluating SCD rheology which can greatly improve patient treatment and reduce morbidity.