ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2023
The Young Physician-Scientist Awards (YPSA) recognize physician-scientists who are early in their first faculty appointment and have made notable achievements in their research.
About the awardee
Jonathan Dale Casey, MD, MSc is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center with a focus on designing innovative and efficient clinical trials to improve outcomes for critically ill adults. This work is supported by grants from the NIH and Department of Defense and has spanned the gamut from proof-of-concept trials in extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) to large comparative effectiveness trials embedded in the electronic health record.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Casey wrote the protocol for the NHLBI’s first trial of a repurposed drug for patients hospitalized with COVID-19. The ORCHID trial, conducted by the Prevention and Early Treatment of Acute Lung Injury (PETAL) Network, progressed from study conception to enrollment of the first patient in 15 days and completed enrollment in 4 months, providing critical evidence during the early phases of the pandemic.
While traditional, explanatory trials like ORCHID are the gold-standard for evaluating new drugs, they are too expensive and inefficient to address the innumerable treatment decisions that physicians confront every day in practice. To address this problem Dr. Casey's group, the Pragmatic Critical Care Research Group (PCCRG), has developed novel approaches to embedding “pragmatic” randomized clinical trials within clinical care to rapidly generate evidence for common management dilemmas. As the Director of the Clinical Coordinating Center for the Pragmatic Critical Care Research Group, Dr. Casey has enrolled thousands of critically ill adults into highly efficient trials focused on emergency airway management, non-invasive respiratory support, fluid management, ECMO, and oxygen targets. This work has been published in high-impact journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Lancet Respiratory Medicine, and the American Journal of Respiratory Critical Care Medicine and has led to fundamental changes in the standards of care for critically ill adults.