John Stendahl, MD, PhD, an instructor in the Section of Cardiovascular Medicine, has been awarded a five-year K08 career development award from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI).
The project uses a technique called normothermic machine perfusion (NMP), in which an organ is put on a pump and supplied with red blood cells, oxygen, and nutrients at normal body temperature.
The NIH grant, “Targeted delivery of nanomedicines to the coronary microvasculature during ex vivo normothermic perfusion of marginal human hearts,” aims to develop targeted therapies to treat ischemia-reperfusion injury and improve the availability of hearts for transplantation. Stendahl’s research and clinical interests focus on non-invasive imaging approaches for early-stage disease detection and guided therapy.
Stendahl completed advanced fellowships in clinical and translational cardiovascular imaging at Yale. He received his PhD in engineering from Northwestern University in 2005 and graduated from the University of Minnesota Medical School in 2011.
Mentors and collaborators on the K08 award include Albert J. Sinusas, MD, professor of medicine, radiology, and biomedical engineering and director of the Yale Translational Research Imaging Center (Y-TRIC) and Gregory Tietjen, PhD, assistant professor surgery in the Department of Surgery who was instrumental in the development of research to adapt isolated organ machine perfusion.
“This grant will leverage Dr. Stendahl’s unique expertise in materials science and engineering, cardiovascular physiology, and cardiac imaging for the development of novel multi-modality imaging approaches for the assessment and conditioning of donor hearts during ex vivo normothermic perfusion in preparation for transplantation,” said Sinusas.
The K08 NIH Award goes into effect on January 1, 2022.
This grant will leverage Dr. Stendahl’s unique expertise for the development of novel multi-modality imaging approaches for the assessment and conditioning of donor hearts during ex vivo normothermic perfusion in preparation for transplantation.
Albert J. Sinusas, MD
The grant discussed in this article was awarded by the National Institutes of Health under Award Number 1K08HL155888-01A1.