Research in the Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Medicine

Research in the Anesthesia Center for Critical Care Research focuses on developing and testing new ways to make problematic procedures in the intensive care unit safer and more effective.

The Anesthesia Research Center (ARC) brings together essential research resources for department investigations and consists of clinical research coordinators/fellows, data scientists, statisticians and research administrators with extensive experience in clinical research. The ARC helps to facilitate all aspects of a research project, from study start-up to completion, and with services spanning Institutional Review Board assistance, subject recruitment, data collection/entry and statistical analysis. The ARC has also established a pathway that leverages the electronic health record so departmental investigators can get involved in observational research. By providing a robust research infrastructure, the ARC aims to support investigators throughout the research process in an effort to optimize study design and execution, regulatory oversight and statistical methods.

Research in the Beecher/Mallinckrodt Laboratories for Molecular Pharmacology Research focuses on elucidating the molecular mechanisms by which general anesthetics act to produce anesthesia and its side effects. Our work aims to create better treatments and ultimately a safer and more efficient practice of anesthesiology.

The Center for Translational Pain Research strives to improve the clinical management of patients experiencing acute, chronic and cancer pain conditions. The center uses a multidisciplinary and mechanism-based research approach to clinical pain management together with basic science pain research.

The Clinical and Biochemical Pharmacology Laboratory focuses on elucidating the mechanisms of injury-related muscle wasting and exaggerated pain in order to find novel approaches to mitigate these acute- and long-term adverse outcomes of injury and associated inflammatory responses. The long-term goals of the laboratory are to improve the prognosis of patients with critical illness-induced complications, mitigate suffering—specifically for patients who are severely burned, injured or septic—and identify novel therapeutic maneuvers to rectify the deleterious consequences of injury and inflammation.

The Medical Device Plug-and-Play (MD PnP) Interoperability & Cybersecurity Program is a recognized leader in the development of the concepts and capabilities for integrated clinical environments of the future. Working with a geographically dispersed team of collaborators, the program has developed an open interoperable medical device clinical research platform, sharable databases, tools and applications. The goal is to enable a broader community of researchers and manufacturers to implement medical device interoperability aimed to improve patient safety and health care efficiency.

The Neuroscience Statistic Research Lab is a collaboration of investigators from Mass General, Harvard, MIT and Boston University that uses a systems neuroscience approach in studying how the state of general anesthesia is induced and maintained. The long-term goal of our research is to establish a neurophysiological definition of anesthesia; safer, site-specific anesthetic drugs, and to develop better neurophysiologically based methods for measuring depth of anesthesia.

The Pulmonary Imaging and Bioengineering Laboratories are a multidisciplinary, interdepartmental group of investigators who strive to advance the understanding of whole-organ physiology and pathophysiology of the human lung through the development and implementation of advanced imaging techniques, sophisticated mathematical and computer modeling, and bioengineering.