Jeff Haspel, MD, PhD

Research Interests

The overall focus of my lab is to understand the impact of circadian rhythms in the critically ill, especially for those patients with respiratory failure due to pneumonia or generalized sepsis. Circadian rhythms are daily variations in biological function that are critical for health. In the ICU environment circadian rhythms are routinely overlooked on the assumption that they are absent in critically ill patients. However our observations in mouse models suggest that circadian rhythms may in fact be prevalent at the molecular level in systemically ill organisms. To this end we are pursuing several projects to understand the purpose of circadian regulation during critical illness. First we are analyzing how inflammation alters circadian rhythms in macroautophagy, a catabolic process responsible for digesting unwanted cellular components in lysosomes. In a separate project we are analyzing the biological ramifications of circadian rhythm disruption in animal models of viral pneumonia and bacterial sepsis. Finally we are examining how chronological age interacts with circadian rhythms to influence the severity of viral pneumonia and chronic lung remodeling after resolution of the acute infection. We hope this work will improve our understanding of time as a biological variable in sepsis and respiratory failure, and also engender new thinking relevant to managing patients in the ICU.