Dr. Bauer’s work is focused on identifying a non-invasive biomarker for pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), a fatal progressive illness that causes severe shortness of breath and right heart failure.
Pulmonary arteries carry blood from your heart to the lungs, where it picks up oxygen to be delivered throughout your body. In PAH, the pulmonary arteries constrict abnormally. This forces your heart to work faster and causes blood pressure within the lungs to rise.
Dr. Bauer said current treatments for PAH do not prolong life, and median survival following diagnosis is approximately three years.
Currently, the gold-standard for diagnosis of PAH is the use of invasive right heart catheterization. Dr. Bauer said one goal of her research is to identify a circulating biomarker – called microparticles – that can help with diagnosis as well as staging of this progressively fatal disease.
Dr. Bauer is also hoping to determine if microparticles can assist with an earlier diagnosis and potentially better or faster treatment. “By characterizing these circulating microparticles, we hope to identify patients earlier in the disease course when current therapies may be more beneficial,” she said.
In addition, Dr. Bauer said the microparticles – that carry a variety of factors that can change cell behavior – promote changes in lung circulation. “Microparticles may actually play a role in the progression of PAH,” she said. “As we understand their function, we hope to develop drugs to inhibit their influence and treat this devastating disease.”
Click here to learn more about this research from Dr. Bauer. To learn more about PAH, click here and here.
