Christine Vigeland, MD, found her calling during residency as the H1N1 pandemic was ending in 2010. She dedicated her career to researching acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and treating ICU patients. Ten years later, the knowledge she’s gained and her continued commitment to the most critical patients are guiding her through another pandemic.
“I don’t think people really understood how sick someone can get from something like the flu, until now,” said Christine Vigeland, MD, instructor in the division of pulmonary diseases and critical care medicine. “Even my family. I don’t think they’ve really understood what I do and the type of patients I take care of until the past few months. I think there’s a general realization of how sick people can get and how serious these diseases are.”
Vigeland is a pulmonologist that takes care of some of the sickest patients in a hospital – those in the intensive care unit (ICU). These days those units are filled with COVID-19 patients struggling with the ravaging effects of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which has been widely shown to cause acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) in the lungs. Vigeland spends a majority of her time researching how the body’s metabolism changes when someone has ARDS, and how targeting different metabolic pathways may promote recovery.
“At the moment, I’m mostly focused on analyzing data from experiments from earlier this year on how macrophage metabolism changes in response to different inflammatory stimuli,” said Vigeland, a member of the UNC Marsico Lung Institute. Macrophages are immune cells that can destroy invading pathogens, such as bacteria or viruses.
She’s also planning future experiments, some tied to COVID-19.
Read more in the UNC Health and UNC School of Medicine Newsroom.