Potential Cost-effectiveness of Early Identification of Hospital-acquired Infection in Critically Ill Patients.

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. 

Dr. Chu's clinical research is focused on staphylococci and endocarditis (IE).  She is the director of the International Collaboration on Endocarditis (ICE), a group of investigators from 78 sites in 32 countries worldwide that is dedicated to further the understanding of infective endocarditis.  The ICE database comprises > 5000 cases of endocarditis and is designed to answer questions that could not be answered from a single-center study. The current focus of this group is surgical-decision making in the treatment of endocarditis. Another major focus of Dr. Chu's research is on the relationship between oral hygiene and risk for developing infective endocarditis.

Dr. Welty-Wolf studies (1) pathophysiology and treatment of acute lung injury and (2) multiple organ failure and disordered energy metabolism in sepsis. Injury models include hyperoxic lung injury and ARDS with multiple organ failure due to sepsis. In addition to evaluating mechanisms of lung injury in sepsis, current studies are being conducted to evaluate the potential role of monoclinal antibodies to neutrophil adhesion molecules in the prevention of this injury. Other sepsis work includes evaluating mechanisms of oxidative damage to mitochondria. Additional research efforts include evaluating the use of human recombinant manganese superoxide dismutase in preventing hyperoxic lung injury.

Determinants of Outcome in Patients with Staphylococcus aureus Bacteremia
Antibacterial Resistance
Pathogenesis of Bacterial Infections
Tropical medicine/International 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.

1. Emerging Infections
2. Global Health
3. Epidemiology of infectious diseases
4. Clinical microbiology and diagnostics
5. Bioterrorism Preparedness
6. Surveillance for communicable diseases
7. Antimicrobial resistance

Shelby D. Reed, PhD, is Professor in the Departments of Population Health Sciences and Medicine at Duke University’s School of Medicine.  She is the director of the Center for Informing Health Decisions and Therapeutic Area leader for Population Health Sciences at the Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI).  She also is core faculty at the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy. Dr. Reed has over 20 years of experience leading multidisciplinary health outcomes research studies. Dr. Reed has extensive expertise in designing and conducting trial-based and model-based cost-effectiveness analyses of diagnostics, drugs and patient-centered interventions. In 2016, she co-founded the Preference Evaluation Research (PrefER) Group at the DCRI, and she currently serves as its director. She and the group are frequently sought to conduct stated-preference studies to inform regulatory decisions, health policy, care delivery, value assessment and clinical decision making with applied projects spanning a wide range of therapeutic areas. She served as President for ISPOR in 2017-2018, and she currently is Past-Chair of the Society’s Health Science Policy Council.

Areas of expertise: Health Economics, Health Measurement, Stated Preference Research, Health Policy, and Health Services Research