Clinical Trials

ASCEND researchers are partnering with families of children who receive extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) after a sudden failure of breathing named pediatric acute respiratory distress syndrome (PARDS). ECMO is a life support technology that uses an artificial lung outside of the body to do the lung's work. ASCEND has two objectives.

This study will pilot test a just-in-time (JIT) adaptive intervention to reduce severe respiratory illness, for children with severe cerebral palsy (CP). The intervention program, called RE-PACT, delivers timely, customized action planning and health coaching when mobile text messaging with families predicts hospitalization risk is elevated. A total of n=90 caregivers of children with severe CP will be enrolled from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW) and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and can expect to be on study for up to 6 months.

The purpose of this study is to test if visualizing the heart with cardiac MRI/echo will be important in the understanding cardiac function and prediction of cardiopulmonary symptoms, physical effort tolerance, and outcomes in COVID-19 survivors.

This is a phase 3 study designed to evaluate whether the administration of ganciclovir increases ventilator-free days in immunocompetent patients with sepsis associated acute respiratory failure. Our hypothesis is that IV ganciclovir administered early in critical illness will effectively suppress CMV reactivation in CMV seropositive adults with sepsis-associated acute respiratory failure thereby leading to improved clinical outcomes.

This study is a large pragmatic stepped-wedge trial of electronic health record (EHR)-based implementation strategies informed by behavioral economic principles to increase lung-protective ventilation (LPV) utilization among all mechanically ventilated (MV), adult patients. The study will compare the standard approach to managing MV across 12 study Intensive Care Units (ICUs) within University of Pennsylvania Health System (UPHS) versus interventions prompting physicians and respiratory therapists (RTs) to employ LPV settings promote LPV utilization among all MV patients.

The long-term goal of this study is to develop and refine in-person and telehealth strategies for the delivery of Intensive Care Unit (ICU) recovery care for the treatment of PICS.

The purpose of this study is to assess the safety and accuracy of a CFK equation-based iCO personalized dosing algorithm of inhaled carbon monoxide (iCO) to achieve a target COHb level of 6-8% in mechanically ventilated patients with sepsis-induced ARDS.

ASCEND researchers are partnering with families of children who receive extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) after a sudden failure of breathing named pediatric acute respiratory distress syndrome (PARDS). ECMO is a life support technology that uses an artificial lung outside of the body to do the lung's work. This study aims to learn more about children's abilities and quality of life among ECMO-supported children in the year after they leave the pediatric intensive care unit. It will also compare short and long-term patient outcomes in two groups of children: one group managed with a mechanical ventilation protocol that reserves the use of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) until protocol failure to another group supported on ECMO per usual care.

This study is a multi-center, randomized, partially double-blind, and placebo-controlled Phase Ib clinical trial of inhaled CO (iCO) for the treatment of sepsis-induced acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). The purpose of this study is to evaluate the safety and accuracy of a Coburn-Forster-Kane (CFK) equation-based personalized iCO dosing algorithm to achieve a target carboxyhemoglobin (COHb) level of 6-8% in patients with sepsis-induced ARDS.

The overall goal of the study is to risk stratify pediatric Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) patients and to identify sub-phenotypes with shared biology in order to appropriately target therapies in future trials. This is a prospective, multicenter study of 500 intubated children with ARDS, with planned blood collection within 24 hours of ARDS onset and subsequent measurement of plasma protein biomarkers and peripheral blood gene expression.