ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2023

Bhakti K. Patel, MD is a clinical trialist specializing in complex multidisciplinary interventions to improve outcomes in patients with respiratory failure. Her scholarship has been built on a foundation of collaboration, innovation, and program development. Dr. Patel has conducted clinical trials examining the long-term outcomes in patients enrolled in two trials of helmet ventilation in acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and early physical/occupational therapy during mechanical ventilation, known as early mobilization. We have demonstrated that the impact of helmet ventilation extends beyond its ventilator-sparing potential as helmet ventilation is the only known intervention to improve the long-term outcomes in ARDS survivors. Dr. Patel has continued her work on mitigating disability after critical illness, in a second clinical trial examining one-year outcomes with early mobilization for which she received a K23 career development award. Her preliminary findings suggest that early mobilization is the first known intervention to improve long-term cognitive impairment in survivors of mechanical ventilation.

In addition, Dr. Patel has collaborated extensively with data- and translational scientists to illuminate the biologic plausibility of clinical phenotypes identified within critical illness syndromes such as sepsis. Her team's biospecimen repository of serial blood samples in patients with sepsis have been used to understand the biology underlying timing of resolution of septic shock and support the plausibility of temperature trajectory subphenotypes. She haS also collaborated with Eric Pamer, MD to collect serial fecal samples in critically ill patients with respiratory failure and shock to understand how immunomodulatory fecal metabolite profiles may predict mortality in COVID-19 patients with respiratory failure. These discoveries were published in Critical Medicine and Nature Communications.