Common wisdom tells us that cold is our enemy. If generations of Moms can be believed, cold activates the cold virus, the flu virus and any number of other common ills. Mother Nature, too, has taught us the dangers of hypothermia. Two BSD faculty, however, aim to manipulate extreme cold to save lives.

More than 450,000 people in the United States die each year of sudden cardiac arrest. Despite advances in emergency medicine and cardiopulmonary research, the survival rate of these patients is less than 5%.

Within minutes of sudden cardiac arrest, blood stops flowing to the patient’s brain. This in turn very quickly leads first to cell injury, then to cell death. If one could slow this process while heart function is restored, as many as one-fifth of those suffering cardiac arrest could be saved. Drs. Lance Becker and Terry Vanden Hoek, faculty in the Department of Medicine’s Section of Emergency Medicine and members of the Emergency Resuscitation Center, believe they may have found the means through collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory.

Their approach is based on a simple observation: hypothermia can be a good thing and does in fact improve cardiac arrest survival. How hypothermia can be induced effectively, however, is not so simple. The two researchers’ early attempts to induce hypothermia utilized cooling blankets developed by NASA. The results were less than satisfactory. While the skin was cooled quickly and dramatically, the heart and internal organs remained warm.

What they needed to achieve was not dissimilar to the process of cooling a large building -- the goal being to cool the interior, not the exterior. That in turn framed the challenge as an engineering problem, and that led them to Argonne.

Becker and Vanden Hoek eventually teamed up with Argonne engineers Ken Kasza, John Oras and Jeff Franklin to adapt an ice slurry mixture to animal experiments. The slurry had been developed by Argonne initially for use in industrial air conditioning and consists of fine ice crystals pumped through tubes like a liquid. The team hypothesized that a similar salinated mixture could likewise be pumped not through building pipes but rather through veins. If given quickly and directly, the cooling effect could be dramatic enough to slow the damaging process of cell death. But the team also found that cooling patient organs is not the only challenge to be overcome. “The key to saving cardiac arrest victims might lie in the conditions under which blood flow is restored,” Vanden Hoek says. Early results suggest that cooling blood cells prior to reperfusion might be one means of ensuring complete resuscitation success.

Begun with a grant of $50,000 from a grateful cardiac arrest survival, the resuscitation project has now garnered more than $11 million from NIH as well as other foundations and corporations.

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Common wisdom tells us that cold is our enemy. If generations of Moms can be believed, cold activates the cold virus, the flu virus and any number of other common ills...

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