As one of the top conferences in clinical pulmonary and critical care and sleep medicine, CHEST draws clinicians from across the country. But CHEST 2024 wouldn’t have been complete without a delegation from the Temple Lung Center: a national leader in diagnosing and treating lung problems, and a premier lung disease research center. That’s why several Temple Lung Center physicians attended CHEST, including Parth Rali, MD, FCCP, Director of the Pulmonary Embolism Response Team (PERT) Program.
“CHEST is the hub of pulmonary vascular disease,” Dr. Rali explains. “The Temple Lung Center’s Pulmonary Vascular Disease Program includes several unique and complicated disease states, like pulmonary embolism and group 1 and 3 pulmonary hypertension (PH). Given Temple’s large referral base and transplant program, we have an obligation to help manage pulmonary hypertension for patients with advanced lung disease.”
“Right now, our clinical research is making us radically reimagine the vascular phenotype of advanced lung disease for patients with group 3 PH,” Dr. Rali continues. “We have two ongoing clinical trials for group 3 PH in our Pulmonary Vascular Disease Program, and one of the main reasons our faculty came to CHEST was to bring more clinical trials to the Lung Center.”
Dr. Rali presented the results from the ongoing group 3 PH clinical trials at a CHEST session that he chaired, while Temple Lung Center faculty and fellows also showcased research abstracts on similar topics. Their efforts paid off: they were able to bring one more clinical trial to the Lung Center.
This wasn’t the Lung Center’s only win at the conference: Dr. Rali also ran a postgraduate course on pulmonary embolism, participated in a Fellows course teaching about right heart hemodynamics, and was course faculty for a simulation class on mechanical circulatory support devices. First-year Pulmonary and Critical Care Fellow Krunal Patel, MD also presented a study that he worked on with Dr. Rali on multicenter registry data of acute pulmonary embolism cases, which revealed that early intervention of mechanical thrombectomy is linked to improved outcomes.
All of this, Dr. Rali says, shows that the Temple Lung Center is regarded as a national authority on lung disease and treatment. “The Lung Center has expertise in managing pulmonary vascular disease states through clinical trials, experience, and collaboration with thought leaders from across the country,” Dr. Rali says. “It all boils down to great patient care at the Temple Lung Center, and that’s what matters.”