Vanderbilt University Medical Center has received a six-year, $31.6 million federal grant to lead a national effort to better understand acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), pneumonia and sepsis, which together kill hundreds of thousands of people in the United States each year.

Grant HL168478 is jointly funded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The grant will support the Vanderbilt Coordinating Center for the NHLBI/NIGMS ARDS, Pneumonia and Sepsis (APS) Phenotyping Consortium. The center will operate out of the Vanderbilt Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (VICTR).

There are many different causes for and severities of ARDS, pneumonia, and sepsis. Treatment has been hampered by an incomplete understanding of how each syndrome develops. Now, emerging evidence suggests that ARDS, pneumonia and sepsis likely represent many distinct disorders with different underlying causes and disease mechanisms.

A major goal of the consortium is to understand the different types of ARDS, pneumonia, and sepsis, and from that, to develop treatments targeting specific dysfunctional pathways. Early work will focus on “phenotyping” ARDS, pneumonia and sepsis — identifying subtypes of each syndrome based on biological similarities and differences among different patients.

“The goal is to better understand the association of patient characteristics, especially their biochemistry and underlying pathophysiology, with outcomes,” said Gordon Bernard, MD, VUMC Executive Vice President for Research, VICTR program director and a principal investigator of the consortium’s coordinating center.

“Identifying and leveraging precision diagnoses will transform the methods of critical care research and medical practice, and ultimately will change the trajectory of patient outcomes for the better,” Bernard said.

Source: https://news.vumc.org/2023/05/04/vumc-to-coordinate-national-effort-to-reduce-ards-pneumonia-sepsis/