PIPages
Labs

Raghavan Pillai Raju

Augusta University, GA·Physiology

Severe blood loss causes almost half of all trauma deaths, and the risk of dying from injury rises sharply with age. Why do older bodies cope so poorly, and can something from young bodies help?

Fields

Physiology

Medicine & Clinical Research

Biochemistry

Topics

aging

hemorrhagic shock

trauma

Grants
1 known grant, through Feb 2027

What they work on

  1. Test whether extracellular vesicles from juvenile mouse plasma improve organ function and survival in mature and old mice after hemorrhagic shock injury.
  2. Identify how juvenile plasma factors protect aged mice after hemorrhage, testing whether they restore mitochondrial function and reduce oxidative stress, using cell biological, biochemical and genomic tools.
  3. Determine whether juvenile extracellular vesicles reduce Alzheimer's disease pathology in 5XFAD mice, a model of this age-related brain disease.

More about the research

In a mouse model of hemorrhagic shock, a life-threatening drop in blood flow after heavy bleeding, the lab has found that young mice survive better than adults. It also found that extracellular vesicles (EVs) from young mice's plasma improve organ function and survival after this injury. EVs are tiny packets cells release into the blood.

Why it matters

Older trauma patients face a much higher risk of dying from severe bleeding. Identifying protective factors in young blood could lead to ways to improve survival and organ function after hemorrhagic shock in aging people. It may also inform approaches to age-related diseases such as Alzheimer's disease.

Known grants

From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.

Reparative effect of juvenile factors in aging and injury

NIH · Jun 2022 – Feb 2027

Closest labs

Lauren Richardson

University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, TX·Biomedical Engineering

Adapt a multi-organ feto-maternal interface chip with a temperature-controlled flow system that perfuses 39°C medium on the maternal side, mimicking heat carried by maternal blood.

Emanuele Cocucci

Ohio State University, OH·Biology

Perform an unbiased calibration of how the number of circulating extracellular vesicles relates to their cells of origin, using enCD63, an engineered version of the vesicle protein CD63, expressed in specific cells of genetically engineered mice.

Radhika Muzumdar

University of Pittsburgh, PA·Physiology

Determine how effectively humanin, a small peptide encoded in mitochondria, protects the heart in mouse models of myocardial ischemia-reperfusion injury and ischemia-induced heart failure in aging, measuring infarct size and cardiac function.

The school

Augusta University: 11 labs on PI Pages, $166M a year on research, 37 research doctorates a year.

More about Augusta University

Reach out

A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.