This is unpublished

integrative approach

Caring for patients with critical illness or respiratory diseases requires a sophisticated command of both respiratory and cardiovascular physiology. 

While powerful molecular biology methods have moved the primary research focus in physiology to cellular and molecular levels, those discoveries invariably raise new questions with respect to how the findings relate to intact organ function.

The role for integrative physiology in the molecular biology era is to investigate how new information obtained at the cellular level of function can be applied to the understanding of intact organ systems and whole body responses to a variety of medically relevant stresses.

We believe that an integrative approach is needed to investigate the underlying pathways of information and function that originate from a cellular level up through increasingly complex levels of organization. Our respiratory physiology research seeks to integrate genetic, molecular, and cellular biology into the physiology of intact systems.

The modern approach to studying and analyzing systems biology and organ level physiology requires rigorous and advanced techniques in optical imaging, molecular genetics, and computer-assisted analysis of complex interactions.

The Integrative Respiratory Physiology Program incorporates these multi-disciplinary and sophisticated approaches towards a more complete understanding of normal physiology and mechanisms underlying disease.

The program focuses on six facets of integrative physiology. They are: 

  1. Physiologic phenotypes of genetically altered mice
  2. Translation of molecular and cellular biology discoveries to whole animal physiology
  3. Physiologic imaging of interactions between cells and the endothelium of the pulmonary microcirculation
  4. Development of computational biology methods to analyze large datasets derived from genomics, transcriptomics and proteomics
  5. Mathematical modeling of lung physiology
  6. Pure pulmonary physiology in unique animal models such as lung transplantation in dogs with mixed hematopoietic chimeras.