A Rockbridge County doctoral candidate at Virginia Tech was awarded more than $100,000 from the National Institutes of Health to explore wound healing in arteries after heart surgery.
Meghan Sedovy is a student in Virginia Tech’s Translational Biology, Medicine and Health graduate program. She was awarded a three-year, $101,000 Ruth L. Kirschstein Predoctoral Individual National Research Service Award.
Her research is based on a discovery she made at Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC. She found that arteries used in heart bypass surgeries are often stripped of a crucial layer of endothelial cells. Without the cells, the long-term success of a surgery may be diminished.
Sedovy is no stranger to the medical field growing up around a hospital as her father is a surgeon and her mother is a nurse.
In rural Rockbridge County, she often observed surgeries and wanted to do something to help her own community as well as the world.
Sedovy felt she could have the most impact on human health, she told a professor in a speech, by developing drugs, methods and technologies that doctors use.
“I just want to make cellular-level discoveries, to really understand what’s happening in disease and why it’s happening,” Sedovy said. “Cardiovascular disease is the most-deadly disease there is, but it does disproportionately affect rural communities. The desire to help my community is an inspiration for wanting to be able to correct these problems and keep people from dying from preventable diseases.”
Sedovy’s research focuses on a protein called Connexin 43, which is more abundant in smaller arteries that have been injured. Sedovy, along with her mentor, Scott Johnstone, believe the protein facilitates healing. The research aims to create a new therapy to aid heart surgery patients.
“They’ve created this environment that lets you go out and try things, to try to be exceptional and they’re there to support you,” Sedovy said of the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute and the Translational Biology, Medicine and Health graduate program. “They really give off this impression that your success is their success.”
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Crystal Graham
