An integrated transcriptome and expressed variant analysis of sepsis survival and death.

My research at Duke has focused on understanding the dynamic between host and pathogen so as to discover and develop host-response markers that can diagnose and predict health and disease.  This new and evolving approach to diagnosing illness has the potential to significantly impact individual as well as public health considering the rise of antibiotic resistance.

With any potential infectious disease diagnosis, it is difficult, if not impossible, to determine at the time of presentation what the underlying cause of illness is.  For example, acute respiratory illness is among the most frequent reasons for patients to seek care. These symptoms, such as cough, sore throat, and fever may be due to a bacterial infection, viral infection, both, or a non-infectious condition such as asthma or allergies.  Given the difficulties in making the diagnosis, most patients are inappropriately given antibacterials.  However, each of these etiologies (bacteria, virus, or something else entirely) leaves a fingerprint embedded in the host’s response. We are very interested in finding those fingerprints and exploiting them to generate new approaches to understand, diagnose, and manage disease.

These principles also apply to sepsis, defined as life-threatening organ dysfunction caused by a dysregulated host response to infection. Just as with acute respiratory illness, it is often difficult to identify whether infection is responsible for a patient’s critical illness.  We have embarked on a number of research programs that aim to better identify sepsis; define sepsis subtypes that can be used to guide future clinical research; and to better predict sepsis outcomes.  These efforts have focused on many systems biology modalities including transcriptomics, miRNA, metabolomics, and proteomics.  Consequently, our Data Science team has utilized these highly complex data to develop new statistical methods, furthering both the clinical and statistical research communities.

These examples are just a small sampling of the breadth of research Dr. Tsalik and his colleagues have conducted.  

In April 2022, Dr. Tsalik has joined Danaher Diagnostics as the VP and Chief Scientific Officer for Infectious Disease, where he is applying this experience in biomarkers and diagnostics to shape the future of diagnostics in ID. 

My research is based at the Duke Clinical Research Institute, a large academic clinical research organization designed to conduct clinical trials from small local studies to worldwide trials. The focus of my research is bacterial infections: complicated skin and skin structure infections; postoperative wound infections; hospital-acquired and ventilator-associated pneumonia; bacteremia; and endocarditis. Many of these trials are conducted in concert with the pharmaceutical industry in order to register new antibiotics. In addition, as director of infectious diseases at the DCRI I oversee the work of the mycology group, and tuberculosis trials. This work also includes work supported by NIH grants including sepsis trials, the Staph Aureus and Staph Epi Bacteremia Groups, and the International Collaboration of Endocarditis. The team of investigators with whom I work is highly experienced, amazingly productive and wonderfully collegial.

As a result of my longstanding interest in tropical medicine and the generosity of my patients as well as the Hubert Family we have been able to establish the Hubert-Yeargan Center for Global Health. As a result we have developed a medical center-wide fellowship in Global Health. I am presently the Director of the Center and the Gary Hock Distinguished Professor of Global Health.

Dr. Geoffrey S. Ginsburg's research interests are in the development of novel paradigms for developing and translating genomic information into medical practice and the integration of personalized medicine into health care.