Alviss

About 65,000 Canadians develop acute respiratory failure requiring breathing machines (ventilators) to give oxygen to their lungs. Unfortunately, up to 50% of these individuals will not survive their illness. Mechanical ventilation through breathing machines, though potentially lifesaving, may further injure the lungs and the respiratory muscles. In the patients with the most severe and life threa...

REMAP-CAP is a randomised, embedded, multifactorial, adaptive platform trial for community-acquired pneumonia. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effect of a range of interventions to improve outcome of patients admitted to intensive care with community-acquired pneumonia. In addition, REMAP-CAP provides and adaptive research platform for evaluation of multiple treatment modalities in th...

Primary Research Question for the Full ULTIMATE Randomized Clinical Trial (RCT): What is the effect of ultra-protective ventilation facilitated by extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) versus best current conventional ventilation (CV) on all-cause hospital mortality among patients with early moderate-severe acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS)? Secondary Research Questions: Among patien...

This Randomized Control Trial will directly compare helmet non-invasive ventilation (NIV) combined with high flow nasal oxygen (HFNO) versus HFNO alone in patients with Acute Hypoxemic Respiratory Failure (AHRF).

Ex-vivo lung perfusion (EVLP) has improved organ utilization for lung transplantation, but it is not yet known whether the benefits of this technology offset its additional costs. We compared the institutional costs of lung transplantation before vs after EVLP was available to identify predictors of costs and determine the health-economic impact of EVLP. We performed a retrospective, before-after,...

Over 2 years have passed since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has claimed millions of lives. Unlike the early days of the pandemic, when management decisions were based on extrapolations from in vitro data, case reports and case series, clinicians are now equipped with an armamentarium of therapies based on high-quality evidence. These treatments are spread across seven main therapeutic...

The pathogenesis of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is characterized by enhanced platelet activation and diffuse hemostatic alterations, which may contribute to immunothrombosis/thromboinflammation and subsequent development of target-organ damage. Thrombopoietin (THPO), a growth factor essential to megakariocyte proliferation, is known to prime platelet activation and leukocyte-platelet inter...

Primary graft dysfunction (PGD) is a form of acute respiratory failure that complicates 30% of bilateral lung transplants. Higher grades of PGD correlate with higher severity of respiratory failure and unfavorable outcomes. Immediate PGD determination posttransplant' however, is not always predictive of PGD over subsequent days or intensive care unit outcomes. We aimed to evaluate whether extravas...

Patients who present to an emergency department with respiratory symptoms are often conservatively triaged in favour of hospitalization. We sought to determine if an inflammatory biomarker panel that identifies the host response better predicts hospitalization in order to improve the precision of clinical decision-making in the emergency department. From April 2020 to March 2021, plasma samples of...