Improving Patient Care

The next steps for Dr. Fryer and his team are to screen drugs that may work with LCN2 to protect the brain from sepsis and similar syndromes. Already, they are screening thousands of drugs that have approval from the Food and Drug Administration and that are part of the National Institutes of Health's Clinical Collection. The team is also focused on better understanding the mechanisms that may connect sepsis with cognitive impairment and dementia.

At the same time, Dr. Fryer's team is working with clinical colleagues to develop other strategies to improve sepsis care. Mayo Clinic has a sepsis response team that defines best practices for preventing and treating sepsis in hospitalized patients. Dr. Fryer's laboratory is working with them to create new ways to identify sepsis earlier.

For example, he thinks it may be possible to use genomic technologies to identify pathogens earlier and start a patient on antibiotics sooner. Dr. Fryer developed additional expertise in genomics through a Gerstner Family Career Development Award. This grant, created with philanthropy from the Gerstner Family Foundation, is awarded through the Mayo Clinic Center for Individualized Medicine. It gives seed funding to young investigators who are pursuing genomic approaches to improve prediction, prevention and treatment of diseases.

"The good news is that Mayo Clinic is the best place to take all of these next steps," Dr. Fryer says. "Collaborating with physicians and pushing the boundaries of translational science is our greatest strength, and that's where this research is headed. In fact, we've already started."

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