Take Heart: MD/PhD Candidate May Revolutionize Cardiac Care
Each year, according to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), more than a million people in the United States have heart attacks and more than half of them die. One of the contributing factors to the sobering statistics is the fact that many victims do not receive the emergency treatment and intervention they need quickly enough to save their lives. Justin Baca, a University of Pittsburgh MD/PhD candidate, is working to change that.
Baca, who graduated from Harvard University in 2001 with undergraduate degrees in chemistry and physics, is engaged in research that he hopes will enable emergency medical technicians, emergency room physicians, and other first responders to detect almost immediately decreased oxygen flow to the heart and begin administering proper care within minutes instead of hours.
As Baca explains, “When someone experiences chest pain, doctors must determine whether the patient is actually having a heart attack. Existing tests can help doctors distinguish heart attack from other causes of chest pain, but they may only be conclusive six to twelve hours after a heart attack.”
Baca is using his background in chemistry to develop a simple blood test that may provide conclusive evidence of a heart attack more quickly and efficiently than ever before. Serum albumin, the most common blood protein, is chemically altered at the very beginning of a heart attack. Baca already has created and lab tested a sensor that can detect chemical changes in human albumin within a few minutes. Now he is hard at work translating that process into a highly portable tool that can be used in the field. After that will be clinical trials.
As a student in the MD/PhD program, Baca spent his first two years at the University of Pittsburgh enrolled in preclinical coursework in the medical school and completing the first of his eight clinical clerkships. Now he is in his fourth and final year of the PhD program in the Department of Chemistry. Once he completes his doctorate, he will return to medical school for two more years, where he plans to finish his clinical training and graduate in 2009. During their summers, MD/PhD students complete research rotations. On top of that, Baca has been spending an average of five hours each week shadowing an emergency medicine physician at UPMC Children’s Hospital.
“Right now, I’m considering emergency medicine as a career, but most medical students figure out what they plan to specialize in during their third year of medical school, so I may change my mind a few times,” Baca says laughing.
Some things that are not likely to change are Baca’s energy, commitment, and talent, which were recognized in 2006 when he received a Minority Predoctoral Fellowship from the National Institute of Health’s National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Engineering.
In addition to supporting Baca’s research, the fellowship has put him among an exclusive group of scholars who will be gathering this month in Colorado for a special mentoring conference sponsored by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
“The conference is an opportunity to bring together all of the people who have earned this particular fellowship so we can meet each other and network,” explains Baca.
Even in that elite community, the soon-to-be “double doctor” surely will stand heart and shoulders above the rest.