Assistant Investigator
Vitalant Research Institute
Denver, Colorado
Dr. Kimberly Thomas is an Associate Investigator at Vitalant Research Institute, Denver. The overall goal of her research program is to improve precision transfusion medicine by providing patients with blood products that meet their specific needs. She applies approaches learned from her molecular and cellular immunology background to answer questions plaguing the transfusion medicine field. For the past eight years she has been studying the hemostatic, immune, and endothelial response to blood product transfusion, with an emphasis in cold-stored platelet products.
Platelet transfusions are a multi-faceted immunological event: not only do platelets serve as a potent source of antigen to drive alloimmune responses, they also are immune cells themselves and thus respond accordingly to their environment, and they engage with and modulate the function of other cells in the vasculature, to include leukocytes and endothelium. Moreover, the storage solution in a platelet product contains multiple biological response modifiers, to include immunomodulatory molecules. Exactly how these mechanisms interface with a given recipient’s physiology after transfusion, thereby affecting processes such as thromboinflammation and alloimmunization, remains poorly defined.
Dr. Thomas’s research aims to understand how donor and manufacturing characteristics can affect a platelet product’s ability to drive immune consequences. Recent projects in her lab focus on (i) understanding how cold-stored platelet transfusion may exacerbate thromboinflammation in settings of traumatic hemorrhage, and (ii) evaluating the allogeneic response to cold-stored platelet transfusion.
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