Marie Hollenhorst, MD, PhD is a physician-scientist and non-malignant hematologist. She is Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Associate Physician in the Division of Hematology at Brigham and Women's Hospital. She completed her MD and PhD at Harvard. She completed a residency in internal medicine, a fellowship in blood banking/transfusion medicine, a fellowship in hematology, and postdoctoral scientific training in chemical glycobiology. Her research lab uses biochemical approaches to study carbohydrate structures (called glycans) that impact bleeding and clotting. Her NBDF-funded research project is motivated by a desire to improve diagnostic assays for patients that have diseases driven by anti-platelet antibodies. There are several diseases where antibodies can bind to platelets and trigger their accelerated clearance, leading to low platelet counts and a risk for bleeding. In many cases, these disorders can be challenging to diagnose as the assays that can be used clinically to detect these anti-platelet antibodies are not always accurate. Dr. Hollenhorst and her team think that one reason that the current assays are not more useful may be that these anti-platelet antibodies bind to certain glycan structures that are as yet uncharacterized. They are working to characterize these glycan structures and determine to what extent they are relevant for anti-platelet antibody binding. It is their hope that this work will lead to the development of improved diagnostic assays for disease such as fetal and neonatal alloimmune thrombocytopenia and immune thrombocytopenia.
Awarded/Presented
Tags
NBDF-Sanofi
Career Development Award
Researchers
Dr. Marie Alice Hollenhorst, MD