
During the NICU rotation of her clinical training, Stella Kourembanas, MD, sat at the bedside of newborn babies with hypoxia. The newborns weren’t getting enough oxygen and were suffering from pulmonary hypertension — abnormally elevated blood pressure in the lung’s blood vessels. What was triggering these patients’ disease?
Kourembanas decided her fellowship research would focus on determining how hypoxia triggers the blood vessels to become abnormal. She built her career, showing how hypoxia affects the endothelial cells that line blood vessels: what genes are turned on, how they regulate interaction between cells and how that affects the lung vasculature. …