Jacksonville, Fla. – Mark Hudak, M.D., a University of Florida professor of pediatrics and chief of the division of neonatology at Shands Jacksonville, was recently named Researcher of the Year during the 2002 Celebration of Research program.
“When I look at who has been chosen in the past five or six years, I am honored. This is a stellar group of peers,” says Hudak. “This award reinforces the fact that if academic physicians weren’t committed to conducting research, we would not have the advances that we do today.”
The UF neonatologist is currently participating in two different studies involving inhaled nitric oxide in pre-term infants. In 2001, Hudak began participating in a multi-center study with the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development to determine whether inhaled nitric oxide increases survival without chronic lung disease in pre-term infants with severe respiratory failure. The Jacksonville campus is also participating in a second multi-center study, funded by the National Institutes of Health Heart Lung and Blood Institute, to determine whether a prolonged exposure to small quantities of inhaled nitric oxide will reduce chronic lung disease in pre-term ventilated infants.
Hudak began focusing much of his research on respiratory distress syndrome (RDS) and chronic lung disease in pre-term infants in the late 1980s when he led a consortium of clinicians to investigate the efficacy and safety of a natural lung surfactant-a fluid secreted by the cells of tiny air sacs in the lungs. Prior to the introduction of surfactants, the only option available to manage respiratory problems was to place babies on ventilators, but this therapy caused stress on the lungs and also contributed to the development of chronic lung disease. Researchers hoped that surfactant therapy could improve survival, decrease complications of acute respiratory disease and perhaps even prevent chronic lung disease.
Two preparations of surfactant, one completely synthetic and the other semi-synthetic, received FDA approval in the early 1990s based on efficacy and safety findings in carefully controlled clinical trials. Subsequent studies by Hudak and his colleagues in more than 2,000 infants demonstrated that the natural surfactant was more effective than the synthetic surfactant in reducing the symptoms and early morbidity of RDS. These trials resulted in FDA approval of the natural surfactant in the mid-1990s.
Another of Hudak’s interests is how to improve the long-term lung outcomes of pre-term infants. In 1995, he joined a steering committee of investigators that developed a multi-center study to determine whether using specialized high frequency oscillatory ventilators might decrease the severity of chronic lung disease compared to conventional ventilators. This study enrolled more than 500 patients, with the Jacksonville center enrolling the largest number. Strikingly, this study, which has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that early and prolonged use of oscillatory ventilation resulted in fewer days of ventilator support and improved respiratory health near discharge. Up to this point, no other single therapeutic intervention, including a number of drug therapies, had been shown to result in such a significant reduction in the severity of chronic lung disease as did changing the modality of mechanical ventilation.
Hudak received his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Amherst College in Amherst, Mass. and his medical degree from The John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md.