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Charles Esmon, Ph.D., is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and head of the Coagulation Biology Laboratory at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation. Dr. Esmon has more than 300 publications related to blood coagulation and inflammation and has served as a consultant with a number of large and small pharmaceutical companies. Among his contributions in the coagulation area were the identification of thrombomodulin (with Dr. Whyte Owen) and endothelial protein C receptor (with Dr. Kenji Fukudome). In the field of sepsis, he and Dr. Fletcher Taylor were the first to show that activated protein C could prevent and treat septic animals challenged with normally lethal levels of bacteria. Most recently, Dr. Esmon has shown that cell death can trigger multi-organ failure by releasing DNA/histone complexes that cause multi-organ failure, a process that can be blocked by inhibiting the toxic histones.