AABB Foundation Grant Spotlight: Tessa Barrett, PhD

Tessa Barrett, PhD, assistant professor of medicine and pathology, NYU Langone Health, received a 2023 AABB Foundation Early-Career Scientific Research Grant. Her “Perioperative Bleeding: Study of Novel Platelet Candidates and a Diagnostic Transcriptomic Signature” project aims to uncover new biological pathways that regulate hemostasis and develop a diagnostic tool to help identify patients at increased risk of bleeding before surgery.

Barrett discussed the inspiration behind her research, the potential to improve prediction of perioperative bleeding risk and how support from the AABB Foundation is helping to advance discoveries in transfusion medicine.

What inspired you to focus your research on perioperative bleeding and platelet biology?

I was drawn to this area because perioperative bleeding is common, clinically consequential and still not well understood. Platelets sit at the center of primary hemostasis, so they are an obvious place to look for mechanisms that might explain why some patients bleed excessively even when they do not have a known inherited bleeding disorder. My lab has long been interested in how platelet biology and transcriptomics can reveal hidden drivers of disease, and this project felt like an important opportunity to apply that approach to a major unmet clinical problem.