Alumni profile

Dr. Keith Crawford investigates cellular response to chemical weapons

by Darla Brown

In 1997, when Dr. Keith Crawford, ’86, started researching cell death in response to chemical weapons, the topic didn’t get too much publicity.

Dr. Keith Crawford

But in a post-September 11 world, his research regarding a potential antidote for chemical weapons exposure has been noticed by the likes of CNN and National Public Radio and other media who have sought him as an expert in the field. Chemical weapons, however, were not on Dr. Crawford’s radar upon graduation from the UT Medical School at Houston. “After I graduated, I did a surgical residency at Howard University, and one of my mentors from Houston, Dr. O. H. Frazier, told me that if I was interested in transplants, it would be nice to have a Ph.D. to be extremely competitive,” Dr. Crawford says.

Dr. Crawford entered a Ph.D. program at Harvard and while he was doing his thesis found a discrepancy in an immune response, which led him to study the cellular response to chemical weapons.

“I proposed a Green Line scenario concept that said if a chemical weapon were released in the Green Line (subway system of Boston), we wouldn’t be able to effectively triage the patients. The idea was to develop an antidote that would repress acute exposure to mustard gas,” he says. “I’ve found that the way the chemical weapon responds to a cell, by a single gene knockdown method, we can protect against the effect of mustard gas by about 70 percent.”

Dr. Crawford is expanding his research to also look at ricin and the pathways of other chemical and biological weapons and how they induce tissue death.

Dr. Crawford says his education at the Medical School helped prepare him for his work during his residency and now at the Harvard Center for Blood Research.

“My medical school clinical training was superior than that of my peers, and I was extremely comfortable in my residency,” he says. “I received accolades as an intern because of my performance in comparison to the surgical residents at the time.

“The academic component also is nurtured and the faculty there are pushing the edge of research – so you got a feel for both. I think any student coming through UT Houston is in a superior position than graduates of a lot of medical schools in the country.”