Cardiac arrest is devastating with mortality around 80%. All efforts need thus to be undertaken to secure good and proper treatment of survivors. During cardiac arrest no blood circulates through the body. Thus, the body experiences a whole body ischemia injury and upon restoration of blood circulation, a whole body reperfusion injury. Ischemia/reperfusion injury triggers the innate immune system, especially the Complement and Toll-like receptor system.

We aim to describe the innate immune reaction as we believe that understanding pathophysiology is vital for designing new treatments to this patient group.

Current projects are:

• Analysis of Complement system and endothelial cell markers in the large observational patient study in cardiac arrest patients (NORCAST – clinicaltrials.gov NCT01239420)
• Sub-study of the ongoing “Targeted Hypothermia Versus Targeted Normothermia After Out-of-hospital Cardiac Arrest” (TTM-2 – clinicaltrials.gov NCT02908308)
• Effect of different temperatures on activation of the Complement system in an ex vivo full-blood model
• Effect of different temperatures on endothelial cell survival in a combined in vitro cell and ex vivo full-blood model

Main aim is to find new therapeutic approaches, which might be tested in future clinical trials.