UHN's Dr Martin Urner presents the Consortium's VV ECMO study at the July 2022 Global Call

For the July 2022 Global Call last week, we were joined by clinical and research fellow in Critical Care Medicine at UHN, Dr Martin Urner who presented on our landmark paper, Venovenous extracorporeal membrane oxygenation in patients with acute covid-19 associated respiratory failure: comparative effectiveness study.

Professor Daniel Brodie, President-elect, Extracorporeal Life Support Organization (ELSO) and Chair of the Executive Committee of the International ECMO Network (ECMONet), describes the paper "as one of the most important recent studies in our field," and that it "sets a precedent for the way observational data can be rigorously evaluated and disseminated."

Read watch here.

Dr Martin Urner graduated from the University of Zürich Medical School and completed his specialty training in Anesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine at the Zürich University Hospital in Switzerland. He started as a Clinical and Research Fellow at UHN in 2016 and is currently working in the role of an attending physician in the Medical/Surgical Intensive Care Unit at the Toronto General Hospital. Supported by a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship, Dr. Urner successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis in Clinical Epidemiology and Health Care Research at the Institute of Health Policy, Management, and Evaluation (IHPME) of the University of Toronto in July 2022. His main research interest is in causal inference and prediction modeling using large observational datasets for research in physiology, anesthesiology, and critical care. The results of his thesis were published in the Lancet Respiratory Medicine and the BMJ. The topic of his talk is how to estimate the treatment effectiveness of ECMO therapy in patients with COVID-19-associated acute respiratory failure.

Read more about the VV ECMO study via the Critical Care Research Group.