Grant: Operating Grant

When newborns lacking oxygen (asphyxia) are resuscitated, they may develop poor heart function and multiple organ failure during recovery. This contributes to significant mortality, short-term and long-term morbidity. The current treatment consists mainly of supportive therapies. We recently observed an improved recovery of the heart with the administration of an antibiotics, doxycycline, using an established model of newborn resuscitation. The "protective" effect of doxycycline could be related to the regulation of activity of a cardiac-specific enzyme and excessive oxygen stress. We propose to perform sophisticated experiments to detail the protective effects of doxycycline in an intact animal model of asphyxia and resuscitation (specifically in the heart and brain), the administration protocol, mechanism of action as well as the correlation between functional recovery, oxygen stress and histological and biochemical markers of injury. The findings would lay the foundation for future clinical studies in the treatment of asphyxia-injured newborns which is the cause of a million deaths worldwide every year.