Saving lives in the ICU and conducting groundbreaking biomedical research

Dr. Rene Bermea ’12

Clinical Fellow, Harvard Medical School Pulmonary & Critical Care Medicine Fellowship, Massachusetts General Hospital / Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Center for Transplantation Sciences, Massachusetts General Hospital

MAJORS: BIOCHEMISTRY AND PHILOSOPHY

Since his youth, Dr. Rene Bermea ’12 has understood the profound impact that biomedical research has on people’s lives. He was a freshman in high school when his younger sister, at only six years old, was diagnosed with a rare and life-threatening brain tumor that required surgery and left her dependent on a slew of medications to support her endocrine system. This served as his motivation to pursue a career in medicine. Understanding that his sister’s life-sustaining drugs wouldn’t have been possible without the work of biomedical scientists, research became his priority. 

Following high school, Bermea made the trip from his rural Texas town on the Mexican border to his dream school, Notre Dame, and spent his summers conducting research. He eventually made his way to the labs affiliated with MD Anderson Cancer Center, the hospital that saved his sister’s life. He later attended the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine for medical school, where he stayed for residency training in internal medicine. Now, as a fellow in the Harvard Medical School Pulmonary & Critical Care Medicine Fellowship Program at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), Bermea is caring for critically ill COVID-19 patients while conducting research in pursuit of subspecialization in lung transplantation and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO).

While caring for patients in the ICU, Bermea was the lead author on a published study that found an association between devastating intracranial hemorrhages and inflammatory markers in patients with COVID-19 on ECMO, a machine that continuously removes blood from the body, oxygenates it when the lungs cannot, and then returns it back to the patient. He is now working in the laboratories at MGH’s Center for Transplantation Science, hoping to uncover the immunological mechanisms of chronic rejection after transplant. He is also working with a group at BIDMC and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that aims to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify systemic disparities and existing biases affecting the receipt of lungs for transplantation.