Sex Influences Outcome after Intracerebral Hemorrhage

Speaker:
Asst Prof Michael Luke James
Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology and Neurology, Department of Anesthesiology
Duke University Medical Center

Host:
Prof Patrick Casey
Senior Vice Dean, Office of Research,
Duke‐NUS Graduate Medical School

Date:
Wednesday , 29 February 2012

Time:
12.00 PM — 1.00 PM
(Light refreshments will be served at 11.30 AM)

Venue:
Amphitheatre, Level 2
Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School
8 College Road, Singapore 169857
(opposite Singapore General Hospital, Block 6/7)

Contact Person:
Ms Maria Isabella, Duke-NUS Research Affairs Department
Tel: 6516 7255 or Email: isabella.a@duke‐nus.edu.sg

Synopsis: 
Intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) remains a relatively common but devastating form of cerebrovascular disease with little improvement in outcomes over the last two decades. Despite recent priority reports by the National Institutes of Health and the American Heart Association, ICH remains understudied without any proven therapeutic intervention, as evidenced by several disappointing, yet costly, multicenter clinical trials. Similar to ischemic stroke, the failures of preclinical translation are partially due to poor understanding of sex effects on efficacy of different therapeutics and its role in neurological outcome. It has been demonstrated that sex differences exists in multiple mechanisms of acute CNS injury but is poorly understood in ICH. Thus, examining these differences in outcome after ICH will lead to improved clinical trial design and targets for potential therapeutic development. This lecture will serve three purposes: first, to review the preclinical evidence that sex influences outcomes in models of ICH; second, to address the hypothesis that sex affects longterm neurological outcome after ICH in humans; third, to supply the preliminary data and generate hypotheses for mechanisms through which these differences might occur.

Biography:
After earning his medical degree from the Louisiana State Health Science Center in New Orleans, Dr. James completed an internship in internal medicine followed by complete residencies in neurology and anesthesiology and a stroke/critical care fellowship at Duke University. After completing clinical training, he applied for funding through a T32 training mechanism and was awarded the opportunity to attain valuable lab experience in the Multidisciplinary Neuroprotection Laboratories under the guidance of Drs. Daniel Laskowitz and David Warner. There, Dr. James mastered critical lab skills such as microsurgery, immunohistochemical staining, and protein assays while validating transgenic murine models of intracerebral hemorrhage and traumatic brain injury. This training interval combined basic and clinical research in cerebrovascular disease of patients in the neurological intensive care unit, resulting in presentations at national meetings, peer-reviewed publications, national awards, and competitive funding from the American Heart Association and Foundation for Anesthesia Education and Research.

Dr. James recently completed the Duke University Course on Scientific Leadership and Management, an interactive learning program designed to equip junior faculty with the knowledge and professional competencies to effectively lead dynamic scientific research enterprises, and the the NINDS Clinical Trials Methods Course, a week long instruction in the latest in early stage clinical trial design for neurological disease. This culminated in his recent participation in the International Stroke Genetics Consortium, a group of like minded stroke investigators interested in preventing and treating stroke through genomic research. He serves as the Duke site PI for NIH funded multi-center trials, such as CLEAR IVH, ERICH, and ATACH-II and has been awarded the John D. Michenfelder New Investigator Award by the Society for Neuroscience in Anesthesiology and Critical Care as well as the Annual Scientific Award from the Society of Critical Care Medicine. Dr James has helped form a group of like-minded investigators at Duke through the Brain Injury Translational Research Center to study translational approaches to acute brain injury mechanisms and joined the Genomics Medicine Group within the Institute for Genomic Sciences and Policy at Duke. His current projects are aimed at developing a large human database and tissue biorepository to translate findings from his murine models regarding the proteogenomic effects of sex on recovery after intracerebral hemorrhage.