The University of Texas Health Science Center at Tyler (UTHSCT) has received a new, two-year, $881,000 grant from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The new grant funds three UTHSCT professors of medicine as principal investigators — Dr. Steven Idell, Dr. Andrey Komissarov and Dr. Galina Florova — to set up a model of persistent blood accumulation in the pleural space that surrounds the lungs. The pleural space is that potential space between the lung and chest wall that can fill with blood that clots and scars with what is called retained hemothorax, causing respiratory problems that affect about 14,000 patients in the nation every year.
Because best treatment for this condition is now unclear, the NIH is funding creation of this new model to determine best candidate treatments for near-term clinical trial testing.
Senior Vice President for Research and Dean for the UTHSCT School of Medical Biological Sciences Dr. Steven Idell said the research could provide a pharmacological treatment to avoid repeated surgeries for this problem.
“We think this problem can be best treated pharmacologically,” Dr. Idell said. “We have a new agent in a phase two clinical trial testing for infection in the pleural space that can be helpful here.”
Surgery is often used to treat clotted intrapleural blood collections, but this is a problem since people with hemothorax often have had trauma from a car accident, gunshot, other penetrating wounds, and sometimes a bleeding disorder, which makes such surgeries more hazardous.