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Research Overview

Dr. McAlvin's research in the Kohane Laboratory for Biomaterials and Drug Delivery is directed at developing medical devices and drug delivery systems for the practice of critical care medicine and anesthesia. There are several areas of investigation that he is pursuing:

  1. Selective hemofiltration: A major focus of Dr. McAlvin's research is on the development of a blood filtration device that, when incorporated into commonly used extracorporeal systems (dialysis, apheresis, ECMO), enables selective removal of molecular targets from the circulation. Applications under investigation include selective cytokine filtration to inhibit the systemic inflammatory response and filtration of free circulating hemoglobin and myoglobin from hemolysis and muscle injury.
  2. Prolonged duration local anesthesia (PDLA): Dr. McAlvin also studies a variety of controlled release systems to encapsulate local anesthetic agents and produce prolonged duration nerve blockade following a single injection. Adverse tissue reaction has been the major limitation of all PDLA formulations and his research efforts in this field have focused on characterizing that local tissue injury in the interest of developing more biocompatible PDLA formulations.
  3. Corneal anesthesia: Dr. McAlvin and colleagues developed a novel local anesthetic formulation that when topically applied to the eye, produces corneal anesthesia of much greater duration than any current clinical formulations. He is currently working to characterize the pharmacologic mechanisms by which this novel drug combination works.

Research Background

Dr. McAlvin earned his medical degree from the Medical College of Georgia and then went on to complete residency and chief residency in Pediatrics at Emory University followed by fellowship at Boston Children's Hospital in Pediatric Critical Care Medicine. He is board certified in Pediatrics and Pediatric Critical Care Medicine.

Dr. McAlvin is a staff physician in the Division of Medicine Critical Care, where he attends in the Medicine Intensive Care Unit, Medical Surgical Intensive Care Unit and Intermediate Care Program.

Selected publications:

  1. McAlvin JB, Reznor G, Shankarappa SA, Stefanescu CF, Kohane DS. Local toxicity from local anesthetic polymeric microparticles. Anesth Analg. 2013 Apr;116(4):794-803.
  2. Timko BP, Arruebo M, Shankarappa SA, McAlvin JB, Okonkwo OS, Mizrahi B, Stefanescu CF, Gomez L, Zhu J, Zhu A, Santamaria J, Langer R, Kohane DS. Near-infrared-actuated devices for remotely controlled drug delivery. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2014 Jan 28; 111(4):1349-54.
  3. McAlvin JB, Padera RF, Shankarappa SA, Reznor G, Kwon AH, Chiang H, Yang J, Kohane DS. Multivesicular liposomal bupivacaine at the sciatic nerve. Biomaterials. 2014 May; 35(15):4557-64.
  4. McAlvin JB, Zhan C, Dohlman JC, Kolovou PE, Salvador-Culla B, Kohane DS: Corneal anesthesia with site 1 sodium channel blockers and dexmedetomidine. Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci. 2015 Jun; 56(6):3820-6.
  5. McAlvin JB, Wolbrink TA. Oxygen metabolism. 2015. Online video. OPENPediatrics. https://hq.app.openpediatrics.org/webUI
  6. Zhan C, Wang W, McAlvin JB, Guo S, Timko B, Santamaria C, Kohane D: Phototriggered local anesthesia. Nano Lett. In press.

 

Publications