Welcome! The Cellular Injury and Adaptation Laboratory (CIA Lab) consists of a multidisciplinary group of investigators who work in the Department of Surgery at the School of Medicine, Washington University in St. Louis. Our mission is to model the response to critical illness and injury. Our aim is to identify novel therapeutic strategies to treat multiple organ dysfunction syndrome (MODS), a common complication of critical illness and a frequent cause of death in intensive care units.

The pathophysiology of MODS is poorly understood, but it complicates a wide variety of systemic insults including surgery, trauma, burns, and severe infection (sepsis). The adaptive response to these injurious stimuli can precipitate cellular and organ dysfunction, which may ultimately lead to death of the host (patient). We believe that recent technological and computational breakthroughs provide an unprecedented opportunity to model, and thereby better understand, cellular and organ dysfunction. The application of functional genomics and systems biology are central components of our investigative strategy.

We invite you to browse our site to learn more about the following:

• 5th NIH Functional Genomics of Critical Illness and Injury Symposium, November 14-15, 2007, Bethesda, MD
  • 4th Symposium, November 13-14, 2006, Bethesda, MD
  • 3rd Symposium, April 21-22, 2005, Bethesda, MD
  • First and Second Symposia (2002, 2003) 
  • Consortium for Expression Profile Studies in Sepsis (CEPSIS)
    • CEPSIS in St. Louis: The Experimentalists meet the Theorists, April 2001
    • First investigator meeting, Boston, December 2000
    • Analysis summit, Santa Fe, November 2000
• Inflammation and the Host Response to Injury Program (Trauma "Glue Grant")
• In the news . . .
  • NIGMS Biomedical Beat, January 16, 2007
  • Outlook Magazine, Summer 2005
  • BioMed 21 web site
  • Environmental Health Perspectives 113 (12): December, 2005
  • Microarray Innovators vol. 2, BioArray News, 17-19, 2005
  • Journal of the American Medical Association 91 (3): 287-288, 2004
  • St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 27, 2003
  • The Scientist, 15 (23): 22, 2001

If you have comments or suggestions, please contact Dr. J. Perren Cobb at CIA Laboratory, Department of Surgery, Washington University, Campus Box 8109, 660 South Euclid Avenue, St. Louis, MO, 63110-1093 or at cobb@wustl.edu.

The other CIA 

This site was born at 0200h on June 12, 1997.

last modified July 28, 2007