Invited Speaker
  • Guy Weinberg
    University of Illinois
    USA
  • Dr. Weinberg is board certified in Internal Medicine (University of California, San Francisco), Medical Genetics (University of California, San Francisco) and Anesthesiology (University of Virginia). He spent several years working in basic science laboratories first in the Biochemistry Department at UCSF and then as a Medical Staff Fellow at the National Institutes of Health. He has worked in the Department of Anesthesiology at the University of Illinois in Chicago since 1989 and the Jesse Brown VA since 1995. He has received competitive support for research from the National Institutes of Health, the Veterans Administration and the American Society of Regional Anesthesia and Pain Medicine. Dr. Weinberg began studying the mechanisms of local anesthetic toxicity in 1996 in response to a single event involving a patient with carnitine deficiency who exhibited extreme sensitivity to bupivacaine. He sought to explain how the patient developed severe arrythmias after exposure to only 22 mg of subcutaneous bupivacaine, and identified a previously unappreciated mechanism of toxicity that involved inhibition by bupivacaine of a key enzyme in the mitochondrial carnitine shuttle. Related studies led to the observation that infusing a lipid emulsion prevents (pre-treatment) and reverses (post-treatment) bupivacaine overdose in intact rats. This finding was translated to the clinical setting in 2006 when Dr. Meg Rosenblatt saved a patient with severe local anesthetic toxicity. He was in cardiac arrest until she infused lipid emulsion with an immediate effect that mimicked the benefit Dr. Weinberg had reported in rats. This phenomenon clearly met an important medical need since to that point local anesthetic toxicity was considered extremely difficult to treat. Lipid resuscitation has subsequently become an important part of the recommendations for treating local anesthetic toxicity and is used worldwide on a regular basis for this purpose. Dr. Weinberg then refocused his laboratory efforts to identifying the mechanism underlying this effect and after a decade of work published a definitive model that described pharmacokinetic, pharmacodynamic and cell signaling benefits. He was recognized for this contribution to advancing the safety of regional anesthesia by the European Society of Regional Anesthesia who conferred their Carl Koller Award (2019) and by the American Society of Regional Anesthesia and Pain Medicine with both their Distinguished Service Award (2011) and the Gaston Labat Lifetime Achievement Award (2020).