Dr. Sandra ”Sunny” Juul, MD, PhD is Division Chief of Neonatology at Seattle Children’s Hospital and the University of Washington. She received her medical degree from the University of Washington, and her PhD from the University of Chicago. Dr. Juul leads a translational neonatal neuroscience research program. The focus is to identify new therapeutic approaches to neonatal brain injury, determine whether they are safe and effective, and if so, bring these new treatments from the laboratory to the bedside. Dr. Juul identified Epo and its receptor in the developing human brain, demonstrated that it is neuroprotective and safe using multiple animal models of neonatal brain injury. Bringing this work from the bench to the bedside, Dr. Juul is currently Principal Investigator of a multicenter randomized controlled trial to determine whether Epo is a safe and effective neuroprotectant for extremely preterm infants. The study, Preterm Epo Neuroprotection (PENUT) is funded by NINDS, and has enrolled 941 babies born between 24-0/7 and 26-6/7 weeks of gestation and will follow them until two years of age for detailed neurodevelopmental assessments. Dr. Juul is also multi-PI with Dr. Yvonne Wu (UCSF) on the High-Dose Erythropoietin for Asphyxia and Encephalopathy (HEAL) Trial, a randomized controlled trial of Epo neuroprotection for 500 term infants with hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE). This multicenter trial will determine whether Epo in addition to therapeutic cooling will improve the outcome for infants with HIE.
