UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — For James Fraser, a doctoral student in the intercollege Molecular, Cellular, and Integrative Biosciences Program at Penn State, studying red blood cell generation is a cause that he can personally understand. That is because he has hemophilia, a bleeding disorder where blood does not clot normally, and understanding blood and the underlying complex roles physiology plays in the blood is important to him.
Growing up, Fraser spent a large part of his childhood in a hospital. He remembered “going into the clinic once or twice a week to get treatment; being in a clinic with kids that had leukemia or were very sick and dying; it gave me a sense of empathy that enables me to understand the life of a patient. When you read about diseases in a text book, the diseases are really abstract concepts.”
Fraser’s first-hand experience with hemophilia helped him to realize that his research can really impact others’ lives. And he has a better understanding of just how much he himself has benefited from others’ research into the disorder. One benefit of that research is that he can treat himself at home, instead of having to go to the hospital for treatment.
Fraser’s interest is centered on researching stress erythropoiesis, a physiological response when bone marrow needs to produce new red blood cells in a short amount of time, e.g. after undergoing a bone marrow transplant, suffering trauma which causes blood loss, or by an acute infection, like malaria that targets red blood cells. His hope is that gaining a better understanding of stress erythropoiesis could one day be helpful in treating anemia, and its accompanying inflammation, and assisting patients recovering from bone marrow transplants, who are temporarily unable to produce new red blood cells after the bone marrow is destroyed in preparation to receive the transplant.