Congratulations to Drs. Aaron Fox and Zheng (Jimmy) Xie, who were notified by the National Institute of General Medicine Studies that their R01 grant entitled "Reversing anesthesia with Caffeine" will be funded for a four year period starting in July 2015.
Anesthetics are used 40 million times in the United States per year. They have been used clinically for over 160 years. Recovery from anesthesia is passive; doctors and patients wait for the anesthetic to be cleared. Our goal in this application is to reverse the effects of anesthetics such that patients can recover more rapidly and completely. In this way they can be released home (outpatients) or released to a ward (inpatients) in a timely fashion without cognitive impairment.
These studies, which span the range from investigating mechanisms in cell lines and animals to drug effects in human volunteers, have the potential to impact medicine in an important manner. Identifying drugs that reverse anesthesia, especially if they reverse anesthesia-induced cognitive deficits, may be extremely useful in both clinical and laboratory settings.
Dr. Robert Fong and Dr. Jeffrey Apfelbaum will have a substantial role in this research as well.
Congratulations to all!