Lauren Jantzie
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Medicine & Clinical Research
Babies born with congenital heart defects (CHD), structural problems in the heart present at birth, often need surgery in their first weeks of life. Many survive, but the most common lasting consequence is neurodevelopmental delay and disability, affecting learning, movement and behavior.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Neuroscience
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
congenital heart disease
neonatal cardiac surgery
cardiopulmonary bypass
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2027
What they work on
- Determine whether perioperative serum levels of cyclohexanone, a solvent used to bond plastic medical devices, are associated with morbidity, mortality and neurodevelopmental outcomes in infants undergoing cardiac surgery.
- Validate those associations beyond the discovery trial cohort using independent cohorts of children from the Toronto CATCH study and neonatal cardiac surgery patients at the University of Michigan.
- Identify the sources of cyclohexanone exposure in IV infusion sets and the cardiopulmonary bypass circuit, and test whether zeolite molecular sieves, porous minerals that trap small molecules, can remove it.
- Define how cyclohexanone and its breakdown products damage the nervous system, using neural cell and brain slice cultures, measures of blood-brain barrier integrity, and in vivo tests of learning and memory.
More about the research
Decades of work on surgical technique, heart-lung machine strategy and drugs have not solved this. An alternative explanation is that the hospital environment itself exposes these infants to harmful industrial chemicals.
Why it matters
Congenital heart defects are the leading cause of birth-defect-related illness and death, and neurodevelopmental disability is the most frequent lasting problem for survivors. If a solvent leaching from medical plastics is contributing, then filtering it out of bypass circuits and infusion sets, for example with zeolite molecular sieves, would be an immediate and actionable change in practice that could improve outcomes for newborns undergoing heart surgery.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Charles Brown
Stanford University, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether cerebrospinal fluid markers of blood-brain barrier leak, inflammation, and neuron and astrocyte injury — including the CSF/blood albumin ratio, cytokines, neurofilament light and glial fibrillary acidic protein — are associated with delirium after aortic surgery in 180 patients with CSF drains.
Lisa Rong
Weill Medical College of Cornell University, NY·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Compare how single versus multiple arterial grafting during bypass surgery changes heart function, measured as echo strain by transesophageal echocardiography, and whether changes relate to blood pressure-support drug use.
Yufeng Shen
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY·Genetics
Benchmark, improve and develop machine-learning methods that predict the effects of missense variants, DNA changes that swap a protein's amino acid, in congenital heart disease genomic data.
The school
Johns Hopkins University: 100 labs on PI Pages, $4.1B a year on research, 622 research doctorates a year.
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