Reggie Lee
University of South Florida, FL·Neuroscience
When the heart stops in cardiac arrest, the brain is starved of blood and oxygen. Even after the heart is restarted, many survivors suffer lasting brain injury, and most patients die from it.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Pharmacology
Physiology
- Topics
cardiac arrest
cardiopulmonary arrest
cerebral ischemia
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Feb 2028
What they work on
- Determine how the enzyme SGK1 reduces brain blood flow after cardiac arrest in rodents, using two-photon microscopy and laser speckle contrast imaging, and identify blood-vessel signaling molecules with PCR, capillary immunoassay, and ELISA.
- Test whether SGK1 drives brain inflammation after cardiac arrest by measuring activation of microglia and astrocytes with histology, flow cytometry, and protein chip assays, comparing animals with and without SGK1 inhibition.
- Measure how SGK1 harms mitochondrial ion balance and energy production after cardiac arrest, using Seahorse respirometry and microspectrofluorometry together with the inhibitor GSK 650394 and neuron-specific shRNA silencing.
- Evaluate whether the SGK1 inhibitor GSK 650394 prevents neuron death and memory deficits after cardiac arrest, using Cresyl violet and Fluoro-Jade C staining and Y-maze and novel object recognition tests.
More about the research
This damage involves three linked problems: reduced blood flow to the brain, inflammation in brain tissue, and failing mitochondria, the cell's energy producers. The lab's long-term goal is to find the molecules that control whether brain neurons survive.
Why it matters
Cardiac arrest affects more than 550,000 people a year in the U.S., and 70–90% of patients die from brain injury. If blocking SGK1 protects neurons after cardiac arrest, it could become a target for new treatments. Because many kinase-targeting drugs are already FDA-approved, findings could move toward clinical trials for these patients.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Michael Johnson
University of Utah, UT·Medicine & Clinical Research
Determine how EPACC, a partly inflated, automatically controlled aortic balloon catheter, affects heart function and the rate of re-arrest during the first 24 hours after resuscitation in a pig model of cardiac arrest.
Ibolya Rutkai-Green
Tulane University of Louisiana, LA·Physiology
Test whether reduced brain blood flow (hypoperfusion), produced in mice by narrowing both carotid arteries (BCAS), worsens age-related leakiness of the blood-brain barrier, using in vivo two-photon microscopy in young and old mice of both sexes.
Ping Zhou
Weill Medical College of Cornell University, NY·Neuroscience
Test whether S-nitrosylation, the attachment of nitric oxide to a cysteine on the mitochondrial protein prohibitin (PHB), is required for PHB to protect neurons, using knock-in mice whose PHB cannot be nitrosylated in models of ischemic brain injury.
The school
University of South Florida: 20 labs on PI Pages, $522M a year on research, 305 research doctorates a year.
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