Jeffrey Gotts, MD, PhD
Research focuses on the effects of cigarette smoke and e-cigarette aerosols on susceptibility to acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), a major cause of respiratory failure in critically ill patients.
ARDS remains a frequently fatal cause of acute respiratory failure, with an estimated U.S. incidence of nearly 200,000 cases per year and a mortality of 30%; no specific therapies beyond supportive measures have been demonstrated to be beneficial. Our research is focused on both improving our understanding of the pathogenesis of ALI and on developing novel biomarker-based strategies for diagnostic and prognostic purposes, with the ultimate goal of developing new preventative and therapeutic strategies for this devastating syndrome. To this end we have developed animal models of how smoke exposure affects the trajectory of viral and bacterial lung injury. More recently we have begun studying e-cigarette aerosols and their toxicity to human lung cells, exposing cultures of alveolar and airway epithelia (derived from human lungs declined for transplantation) in a novel aerosol generating machine.