From the NICU to med school: An ‘outrageous’ idea that’s saved thousands of babies
Hannah Cheriyan was born with her umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. Just hours old and in respiratory distress, she was airlifted to the Newborn Intensive Care Unit at U-M’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital.
For four days, Cheriyan relied on a machine to perform the work of her heart and lungs, giving her lungs necessary time to heal. That machine, known as ECMO, or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, saved her life.
Twenty-one years later, Cheriyan was at U-M again — this time walking the stage in the 2015 White Coat Ceremony, a ritual welcoming students into medical school. And Robert Bartlett, M.D., the Michigan doctor who devoted his career to developing ECMO, “cloaked” Cheriyan with her first official white coat.
“I felt like I had come full circle from the Mott NICU to Michigan Medical School,” she said. “It was such a special experience to share that moment with Dr. Bartlett and for him to join me in the beginning of my own journey as a physician. His work is the reason I’m here today.”
Bartlett said he’s proud to see how far she’s come.
“There wasn’t a dry eye in the house,” he said of the ceremony. “That was a very emotional time, as you might imagine.”
Funding for a ‘far-fetched project’
It took Bartlett and his colleagues more than a decade of persistent research before the lifesaving innovation reached patients such as Cheriyan.
“At the time, it wasn’t just an out-of-the-box idea. It was an outrageous one,” said Bartlett, professor emeritus of surgery at Michigan Medicine and the “father of ECMO.” “In the beginning, most neonatologists thought this was a pretty crazy, far-fetched project.”
Bartlett and colleagues started the journey to pioneer ECMO in the 1960s. It was the early days of pediatric heart surgery, and the mortality rate for children was 50 percent, many dying within days of their procedure. Doctors knew patients could survive if they had a few more days to recover.
The heart-lung machine made cardiac surgery possible, but it caused lethal blood damage when used for more than an hour. These early “artificial lungs” delivered oxygen directly into the blood, which turned out to be harmful after a short time.
Bartlett and colleagues set out to create a gentler oxygen delivery system with fewer side effects. Research teams developed membranes to prevent oxygen from contacting the blood directly — the secret to extending the use of heart-lung machines. The new machine and technology was called ECMO.
Bartlett and other researchers wondered if ECMO could be used for life support during severe heart or lung failure.
In 1975, Bartlett reported the first neonatal survivor of ECMO, a baby battling such severe lung damage that ECMO was used as a last-ditch effort to save her life.
“Our wild idea worked,” Bartlett said. “And it has continued to work remarkably well in all types of patients with heart or lung failure.”
But it took years of dogged research and trials — backed by millions of dollars in federal funding from the National Institutes of Health.
Today, ECMO has saved tens of thousands of babies around the world, including 2,500 patients at U-M, according to the Ann Arbor-based nonprofit Extracorporeal Life Support Organization.
Paying it forward
As for Cheriyan, now 23, she stumbled upon Bartlett’s name while studying biomedical engineering as an undergrad. She sent him an email reading, “Thank you for saving my life.”
She went on to spend four years as a research assistant in his lab.
“It’s a huge privilege to be a part of such an impactful project and being able to give back to the research that made such a difference in my own life,” she said. “I want to pay it forward.”
Tani Shtull-Leber, who will graduate from the U-M Medical School in May and is preparing for an emergency medicine residency in Phoenix, also found his way from the NICU to Bartlett’s lab.
At birth, Shtull-Leber experienced lung failure, turning blue and unable to breathe. He was put on ECMO at a St. Louis hospital near his home at the time.
“My lungs needed more time to develop, and ECMO bought me that time,” he said. “I would not have lived past two days without ECMO.”
Decades later, Shtull-Leber ended up at the U-M Medical School — the same institution where his father, Steven Leber, M.D., is a pediatric neurologist.
“It was really inspiring to see how Dr. Bartlett and everyone in his lab continue to push the boundaries to extend life,” he said.
“We would not be able to advance the field without federal NIH funding to support ideas that may sound ‘out there,’” Shtull-Leber added. “It’s important to support research even when it’s hard to see if there’s going to be a payoff. It’s so hard to predict when the next big breakthrough or innovation is going to be. ECMO is an example of that.”
Today, researchers in Bartlett’s ECMO lab remain steadfastly committed to work in the field.
Projects include using ECMO for an artificial placenta to tackle extreme prematurity, work to optimize implantable artificial lungs and to extend the life of organs before a transplant.
All are ideas the medical industry won’t invest in until research has proved they work, which is why federal funding is critical to discovery, Bartlett said.
“What may seem like a pretty wild idea can someday be a critical treatment,” he said. “As scientists, this is what we do. It’s what we are supposed to do.”
Stay tuned all week as the Michigan Health Blog highlights stories of Michigan Medicine patients who have benefited from NIH research funding. The series — called Science Matters — leads up to the March for Science on Saturday, April 22 in Washington, D.C.