Jonathan Singer
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Lung transplantation is meant to extend life, relieve disability and improve quality of life, but it often falls short: about a third of patients die within three years, and 20-40% of survivors report no improvement in how they function or feel. Why is largely unknown.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Public Health & Epidemiology
Physiology
- Topics
lung transplantation
frailty
sarcopenia
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jul 2029
What they work on
- Determine how sarcopenic obesity, sarcopenia and high body fat affect perioperative complications and patient-reported outcomes at 6 months in 803 lung transplant candidates, with body composition measured by bioelectrical impedance analysis.
- Test whether sarcopenic obesity, excess fat combined with low muscle mass, confers heightened risk for primary graft dysfunction and other perioperative complications even in patients with normal body mass index.
- Define which patient-reported outcome surveys actually change in response to primary graft dysfunction and other perioperative complications, to guide measure selection in future transplant studies and trials.
- Develop landmark prediction models using pre-, peri- and early post-operative factors to identify recipients at risk for poor quality of life at 6 months and graft failure up to 3 years after transplant.
- Characterize the heterogeneous biology of newly described molecular subphenotypes of frailty, biological subtypes defined from blood biomarkers, in patients frail before transplant and those who become frail after it.
- Test whether these molecular frailty subtypes confer different risks for pre-, peri- and post-operative complications in lung transplant, including in older adults, using high-dimensional biomarker and causal inference analyses of multicenter longitudinal cohorts.
More about the research
Both projects here approach that puzzle through the body itself, applying ideas from aging research. They examine frailty, a state of reduced physiological reserve, and body composition, meaning how much of the body is muscle versus fat, and ask how these predict surgical complications, disability, quality of life and death before and after transplant.
Why it matters
Many lung transplant recipients do not regain the functioning and quality of life the surgery promises. A fast bedside measure of muscle and fat could let any transplant center identify high-risk candidates, and knowing which patient surveys respond to complications would tell future trials what to measure. Prediction models could flag who is at risk of poor quality of life or graft failure, improving counseling and making clinical trials more efficient. The PI's earlier frailty work has already informed international guidelines on transplant candidacy.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Laurie Snyder
Duke University, NC·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether specific pretransplant clinical characteristics predict failure to achieve a lung transplant textbook outcome, defined as freedom from primary graft dysfunction, acute lung allograft dysfunction, renal failure and infection.
Chitaru Kurihara
Northwestern University, IL·Medicine & Clinical Research
Determine whether integrated stress response activation of ATF4, a stress-induced gene regulator, is necessary for impaired alveolar epithelial repair after lung transplantation, using mouse transplant models.
Emily Henkle
Oregon Health & Science University, OR·Medicine & Clinical Research
Enroll three cohorts of patients with NTM lung disease, at diagnosis (NTM-WATCH), at treatment start (NTM-TREAT) and at treatment end (NTM-TRACK), and collect patient-reported outcomes and clinical data for up to 24 months.
The school
University of California-San Francisco: 89 labs on PI Pages, $2.1B a year on research, 164 research doctorates a year.
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