ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2021

Marcos G. Lopez, MD, MS, received his MD and MS with focus in clinical and translational science from Mayo Medical School and Mayo Graduate School in Rochester, Minnesota and completed anesthesiology residency and critical care medicine fellowship at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee. His research focuses on the impact of perioperative vascular dysfunction on organ injury. Specifically, he is studying the role of impaired endothelial function and vascular reactivity in humans in order to elucidate mechanisms of postoperative brain and kidney dysfunction to promote the development of novel therapies for these all too common problems. He has shown that intraoperative hyperoxic cerebral reperfusion contributes to brain dysfunction after cardiac surgery and identified associations between intraoperative oxidative damage, neuronal injury, and delirium. He recently identified that intraoperative venous congestion, which impairs perfusion and may induce endothelial dysfunction, contributes to kidney injury.  He hypothesizes that impaired vascular reactivity mediates postoperative kidney and brain injury, and that impaired endothelium-regulated perfusion during surgery and increased endothelial oxidative stress lead to organ injury. To this end, he has designed and performed experiments to measure vascular reactivity (in vivo and ex vivo) and oxidative damage in patients recruited into a randomized clinical trial of normoxia versus hyperoxia during cardiac surgery as part of his NIH K23 award funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

@MarcLopezMD