Tom Egan, MD, MSc.

EMAIL: thomas_egan@med.unc.edu

PERSONAL WEBSITE:

PUBLICATIONS: Publications Link

I am a cardiothoracic (CT) surgeon who started the UNC lung transplant program and directed the CT translational lab to show that lungs could be recovered hours after death from non-heart-beating donors and be safely transplanted. I have a neurologic disability and stopped performing thoracic surgery in 2007. My research interests are related to lung and organ transplant from sudden death victims (uncontrolled Donation after Circulatory Determination of Death donors (uDCDs)). This led to research into ischemia-reperfusion injury (IRI). I have expertise and interest in organ allocation policy for transplant. I collaborate with an acoustic engineer at NCSU and we are investigating quantitative lung ultrasound. We have shown we can use this to quantify severity of pulmonary fibrosis and pulmonary edema, and new technology using ultrasound multiple scattering to localize pulmonary nodules in lung tissue. Recently I collaborated with a faculty member in the School of Pharmacy and we showed roles for a novel biogel patch that can be used to prevent lung air leak, reduce bleeding, and enhance wound healing.

My laboratory has swine and rodent models of lung transplant (rat and mice), and cell culture models of IRI. This sentence should be inserted after the sentence “I have expertise and interest in organ allocation policy for transplant.” We are trying to obtain funding for some of these models.