Christian Con Yost, MD

Languages Spoken: English, German

Christian Con Yost, MD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatrics within the University of Utah School of Medicine, and serves as the Director of the Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine Fellowship training program at the University of Utah. He provides clinical care as an attending physician to critically ill patients admitted to the newborn intensive care units at the University of Utah Hospital, Primary Children’s Hospital, and Intermountain Medical Center. He maintains an active interest in clinical research regarding the role of inflammation in the pathogenesis of necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) and in patients requiring extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) as treatment for cardio-respiratory failure.

Christian Con Yost, MD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatrics within the University of Utah School of Medicine, and serves as the Director of the Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine Fellowship training program at the University of Utah. He provides clinical care as an attending physician to critically ill patients admitted to the newborn intensive care units at the University of Utah Hospital, Primary Children’s Hospital, and Intermountain Medical Center.

Dr. Yost's research interests include the study of regulatory mechanisms governing the acute inflammatory response in newborn infants, both term and preterm, as it relates to syndromes of dysregulated inflammation such as necrotizing enterocolitis, neonatal chronic lung disease, and early onset sepsis. He has received extramural funding to examine translational regulation of protein expression via the mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) signaling cascade in neonatal PMNs. As part of this effort, his research team recently described for the first time a novel deficiency of innate immunity in newborn infants leading to an increased risk of infection in term and preterm infants - failure of neutrophil extracellular trap (NET) formation with decreased extracellular killing of bacteria. Dr. Yost’s research efforts currently focus on elucidating the regulatory mechanisms governing NET formation by human PMNs and the role of dysregulated NET formation in the inflammatory syndromes associated with prematurity.