Critical Care Translational Medicine Group

About the Lab

Located within Massachusetts General Hospital’s Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, the Critical Care Translational Medicine Group is led by Medical Director B. Taylor Thompson, MD.

One of Dr. Thompson’s primary roles is medical director and co-principal investigator of the National Heart, Lung & Blood Institute (NHLBI) Prevention and Treatment of Acute Lung Injury (PETAL) Network Clinical Coordinating Center, which resides in the Mass General Biostatistics Center. In collaboration with Andrea Foulkes, PhD, the center coordinates the design, execution and interpretation of multicenter clinical trials of ARDS and sepsis treatments. These trials are carried out in more than 50 hospitals (organized into 12 clinical sites).

The PETAL Network, and the ARDS Network before it, have completed 10 randomized controlled trials. Dr. Thompson has a major role in the design, management and interpretation of these trials and has held a number of Investigational New Drug Applications with the Food and Drug Administration on behalf of the ARDS Network. Six of the trials have been published in The New England Journal of Medicine, and two are considered landmark trials of lung-protective strategies.

Dr. Thompson also serves as the principal investigator of the PETAL Coordinating Center for the ACTIV-3 and ACTIV-4 suite of clinical trials for COVID-19 and coordinates the PETAL Networks COVID-19 focused research, including an early pandemic RCT of hydroxychloroquine and two 1,500 observational studies.

With an international reputation as a clinical trialist, Dr. Thompson serves on a number of oversight groups related to clinical trials sponsored by the National Institutes of Health or industry and chairs or serves on many Data and Safety Monitoring Boards.

Dr. Thompson has been an active clinical investigator since the early 1980s. His research interests include new therapies for ARDS and sepsis along with the molecular epidemiology of ARDS and sepsis (an area in which he has worked closely with the research group of David Christiani, MD). Thompson serves as a co-investigator on a randomized trial of dexmetomidine to prevent delirium and improve long term functional outcomes for the critically ill in a trial at Mass General led by Dr. Brandon Westover. Dr. Thompson also serves as a co-investigator in a multicenter randomized trial of peri-operative lung protection following high-risk abdominal surgery in a trial led by Dr. Marcos Vidal Mello.

Dr. Thompson also serves as a senior advisor and co-investigator on a Department of Defense funded multicenter randomized trial of inhaled carbon monoxide (CO) for patients with ARDS. This trial is led by Dr. Augustine Choi, MD, at Columbia University, and includes Mass General as a Clinical Site with Dr. Vidal Mello.