ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2023

Sikandar Hayat Khan, DO, MS is a Pulmonary and Critical Care physician at Indiana University School of Medicine and a Young Physician-Scientist with a research focus at the nexus of acute respiratory failure, delirium, and dementia. He is funded by the National Institute on Aging's Paul Beeson Emerging Leaders Career Development Award to study the relationship between oxidative stress pathways and accelerated cognitive and physical aging in survivors of critical illness. In this grant, Dr. Khan is studying regulators of oxidative stress, oxidative DNA damage, and changes in oxidative injury to lipids and proteins utilizing longitudinal blood samples paired with cognitive and physical function assessments. As a clinical-translational scientist, Dr. Khan's work has led to publications on the relationship among biomarkers of neuroinflammation, astrocyte cell activation, systemic inflammation, and delirium duration, and mortality. He has also published on the relationship between age of red blood cells and clinical outcomes, and the overlap between Alzheimer's pathology and biomarkers of delirium. Dr. Khan’s mission is to advance the care of critically ill older adults by developing endotypes for intensive care unit (ICU) delirium. Dr. Khan’s goal is to use biomarker profiles to develop and test personalized medicine interventions to promote recovery after critical illness. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Khan has advanced the collection of biospecimens from critically ill COVID-19 patients and COVID-19 survivors, and obtained cognitive, physical, mental health, and quality of life outcomes from COVID-19 survivors paired with blood sample collection. While he continues his translational studies of these biospecimens, Dr. Khan has implemented a multidisciplinary clinic to provide care for patients recovering from severe COVID-19 (at the Indiana University Health ICU Survivor Center).