Immunology of Cardiac Arrest and Lung Fibrosis
Brigham and Women's Hospital
Harvard Medical School
Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine
Hale Building for Transformative Medicine
ekim11 at bwh.harvard.edu
Research pitfalls
Or how we avoid the existential thoughts that hit scientists at 1 AM.
Pitfall 1: “Does our lab work matter?”
Solution 1.
Avoid incremental results. Head in new directions. Despite the power of immunotherapy in cancer, our approach–using immunology– is less common in cardiac arrest and pulmonary fibrosis. We don’t need to be Picasso if we start with a different lens.
Solution 2.
Start with patients. Our nightmare is years of bench work that ends up irrelevant to patients. So the Kim lab starts with clinical samples and then figures out the mechanisms and drugs in mouse models and in vitro.
Pitfall 2: “Nothing new under the sun?”
Solution 1.
The Kim lab uses discovery methods (like single-cell).
Solution 2.
We make “first-of-its-kind” clinical biorepositories. Like viable PBMC from cardiac arrest patients or lung tissue from early lung fibrosis or RA-ILD.
Solution 3.
We have computational biologists, bench scientists, and physicians under one roof. Dry and wet lab scientists work together to utilize“-omic” datasets and make insights into biology that lead to clinical therapies.