Detecting heart failure via wearable devices

Cardiology researchers have been eagerly taking up consumer electronic devices that include pulse oximeters. Being able to conveniently measure the level of oxygen in someone’s blood is a useful tool, whether one is interested in sleep apnea or COVID-19.

The news that the new Apple Watch includes a pulse oximeter prompted Lab Land to check in with Amit Shah, an Emory cardiologist who has been experimenting with similar devices to discriminate patients with heart failure from those with other conditions.

Shah, together with Shamim Nemati, now at UCSD, and bioinformatics chair Gari Clifford recently published a pilot study on detecting heart failure using the Samsung Simband. The Simband was a prototype device that didn’t make it to the consumer market, but it carried sensors for optical detection of blood volume changes (photoplethysmography), like on the Apple Watch.

Heart failure causes symptoms such as shortness of breath and leg swelling, but other conditions such as anemia or lung diseases can appear similarly. The idea was to help discriminate people who might need an examination by echocardiogram (cardiac ultrasound).

Posted on September 24, 2020 by Quinn Eastman in Uncategorized Leave a comment

Elevated troponin after exercise refines cardiac risk prediction

High levels of troponin, a sign of acute stress to the heart, in the blood reveal whether someone recently experienced a heart attack. Advances in testing have made it possible to detect much lower levels of troponin — but still elevated above zero. For example, elevated troponin can be detected after strenuous exercise, even in healthy young athletes.

With that exercise-induced response in mind, Emory Clinical Cardiovascular Research Institute investigators have been studying whether high-sensitivity troponin measurements might be used to replace cardiac stress tests. These procedures are expensive and sometimes involve nuclear imaging, which exposes patients to radiation.

A new paper in American Journal of Cardiology shows how elevated high-sensitivity troponin levels in response to exercise on a treadmill can predict future outcomes in patients with coronary artery disease — better than stress tests with imaging.

Posted on September 23, 2020 by Quinn Eastman in Heart Leave a comment

Several ways to survey for SARS-CoV-2 exposure

How many people out there have been exposed to SARS-CoV-2? It’s a tricky question, once you think about all the people who have experienced COVID-19 symptoms over the last several months, but didn’t go to the hospital. And there’s a murkier penumbra of people who may have fended off the virus with a minor immune skirmish.

A recent Emerging Infectious Diseases paper from Emory investigators includes antibody tests on a group of more than 100 adults in the Atlanta area who experienced mild flu-like symptoms this spring, but couldn’t get tested for SARS-CoV-2 itself.

A sizable fraction (22 to 48 percent, depending on when they provided blood samples) had elevated levels of IgM against the coronavirus. IgM is the “rookie” antibody produced when the immune system is first encountering something, as opposed to the more seasoned IgG, which appears later in an immune response and tended to rise only in people who were hospitalized. The Emory authors came to a conclusion that others are also reaching:

“Examining IgM and IgG against multiple SARS-CoV-2–related antigens may thus better inform natural history and vaccine studies than any one antibody.”

To answer these kinds of questions more comprehensively, investigators will need to go broader. For example, this week the American Red Cross published data on what proportion of its blood donors have antibodies against SARS-CoV-2. About 3 percent of first-time donors did, using their criteria.

For big answers, we can look to studies such as Emory’s COVID-Vu, a nationwide population-based study using antibody and virus tests taken at home. Rollins School of Public Health researchers received a $6.6 million grant to launch the study this summer. This type of study is designed to cover everyone, whether they were sick or not.

Posted on September 17, 2020 by Quinn Eastman in Uncategorized Leave a comment

For genetically altered mice/rats, freeze and recharge

With a pandemic threatening the health and safety of Emory researchers in March 2020, university leadership made the difficult decision to ramp down some types of research. For investigators that use laboratory mice or rats in their research, this posed a significant challenge.

How could investigators maintain valuable, often unique, lines of genetically engineered animals for future research? The Mouse Transgenic and Gene Targeting Core (TMF) had a solution: cryopreservation. Animals’ sperm — and occasionally, embryos – can be carefully preserved in cold-resistant straws and stored in liquid nitrogen.

“Cryopreservation is a reliable and efficient method for archiving and distributing genetically engineered mouse lines,” says Karolina Piotrowska-Nitsche, PhD, director of the Core.

The TMF is located on the ground floor of the Emory Health Sciences Research Building and provides a suite of services related to transgenics and gene editing, working with tools such as CRISPR/Cas9 to make subtle or complex changes in the DNA of living animals.

Posted on September 16, 2020 by Quinn Eastman in Uncategorized Leave a comment

Georgia survey on COVID-19 testing/vaccination shows group differences

Public health experts stress that adequate representation of Black and Latinx people in COVID-19 vaccine studies is a priority. Given how COVID-19 is impacting vulnerable communities, acceptance of a future vaccine – whenever it may become available – is important. A recent article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution highlights how this issue is playing out in Georgia, given the legacy of lack of trust in biomedical research.

“The issue of minority participation in clinical trials is not just in vaccines, it really is in every clinical trial and the point is that the population that is most impacted and most affected needs to be represented in trials,” Emory’s Carlos del Rio said at a media briefing last week.

In a Sunday Op-Ed in the AJC, emergency physician Monique Smith called attention to the disparities in COVID-19 testing and follow-up. In the communities she serves, it is not just a challenge to get a test but to also understand what the results mean, or what to do while waiting for the results, she says.

Lab Land can add some data to that – a survey conducted by neurologist William Hu and colleagues in early August on attitudes toward COVID-19 testing and vaccination among Georgia residents. Non-Hispanic white respondents were more likely than Black/African-American respondents to recommend their loved ones to participate in a COVID-19 clinical trial or be vaccinated after FDA approval.

Green = Black/African-Americans, Clear = non-Hispanic white

From August survey data

Posted on September 14, 2020 by Quinn Eastman in Uncategorized Leave a comment

Tweaks to corticosteroids may reduce side effects

Steroid anti-inflammatory drugs such as dexamethasone and prednisone are widely used to treat conditions such as allergies, asthma, autoimmune diseases, cancer – and now, COVID-19. Yet they can have harmful side effects on the skin, bones and metabolism.

The side effects are thought to come from a molecular mechanism that is separate from the anti-inflammatory one, and scientists have envisioned that it may be possible to divide the two. A new paper in PNAS from Emory biochemist Eric Ortlund’s lab sketches out how one potential alternative may work.

Synthetic corticosteroids mimic the action of the stress hormone cortisol; both bind the glucocorticoid receptor (GR) protein. Ortlund’s group obtained structural information on how vamorolone, an experimental drug, sticks to the part of GR that binds hormones.

The American company ReveraGen and Swiss partner Santhera are developing vamorolone for Duchenne muscular dystrophy, but it is possible to envision several other conditions such as ulcerative colitis for which vamorolone or a similar drug could be helpful. Vamorolone is NOT approved by the FDA for Duchenne muscular dystrophy or any other indication.

As far as its interaction with GR, what sets vamorolone apart from conventional corticosteroids is quite subtle: a missing hydrogen bond. This means that GR doesn’t interact as well with various partner proteins, which are needed to turn on genes involved in processes such as metabolism and bone growth. However, the anti-inflammatory effects result mainly from turning inflammatory and immune system genes off, and those interactions are maintained. More on that distinction here and here.

Posted on September 11, 2020 by Quinn Eastman in Uncategorized Leave a comment

Improve old antibiotics rather than discover new ones, BME researchers propose

The resistance of bacteria to antibiotics is a global challenge that has been exacerbated by the financial burdens of bringing new antibiotics to market and an increase in serious bacterial infections as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Biomedical engineering researchers at Georgia Tech and Emory are tackling the problem of antibiotic resistance not by creating new drugs, but by enhancing the safety and potency of ones that already exist.

Aminoglycosides are antibiotics used to treat serious infections caused by pathogenic bacteria like E. coli or Klebsiella. Bacteria haven’t developed widespread resistance to aminoglycosides, as compared to other types of antibiotics. These antibiotics are used sparingly by doctors, in part because of the toxic side effects they can sometimes cause.

In research published in the journal PLOS One, Christopher Rosenberg, Xin Fang and senior author Kyle Allison demonstrated that lower doses of aminoglycosides could be used to treat bacteria when combined with specific metabolic sugars. Low concentrations of antibiotics alone often cannot eliminate dormant, non-dividing bacterial cells, but the researchers hypothesized based on a past study that combining aminoglycosides with metabolites such as glucose, a simple sugar, or mannitol, a sugar alcohol often used as sweetener, could stimulate antibiotic uptake.

The authors tested these treatment combinations against Gram-negative pathogens E. coli, Salmonella and Klebsiella. The results showed that aminoglycoside-metabolite treatment significantly reduced the concentration of antibiotic needed to kill those pathogens. The authors also demonstrated that this treatment combination did not increase bacterial resistance to aminoglycosides and was effective in treating antibiotic-tolerant biofilms, which are bacterial communities that act as reservoirs of infection.

Posted on September 10, 2020 by Quinn Eastman in Uncategorized 1 Comment

Many flu viruses needed to crash zoonotic party

With winter on its way, some attention is returning to that other pesky virus: influenza. Emory virologist Anice Lowen and her colleagues recently published a paper in Nature Microbiology highlighting just how inefficient the flu virus is. (Also available on Biorxiv).

It’s not like sperm fertilizing an egg, where one does the trick. Several viral genomes are often required to crash the cellular party. This requirement for multiple genomes may be especially apparent when flu viruses are threatening to cross species barriers – from bird to human, for example.

Multiple infection appears to be more important in this situation!

“An exceptionally high need for multiple infection can occur when an IAV [influenza A virus] infects a new species,” the authors write. “Dependence on multiple infection is of particular interest to cross-species transfer for two reasons: first, it can be overcome in the absence of genetic adaptation through infection at a high dose and second, it leads to high levels of reassortment, which in turn can facilitate adaptation to a new host.”

Posted on September 9, 2020 by Quinn Eastman in Immunology Leave a comment

High antiviral antibody levels may herald pediatric COVID-19 complication

Measuring blood antibody levels against SARS-CoV-2 may distinguish children with multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C), which appears to be a serious but rare complication of viral infection, say researchers at Emory University School of Medicine and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.

Children with MIS-C had significantly higher levels of antiviral antibodies – more than 10 times higher — compared to children with milder symptoms of COVID-19, the research team found.

The results, published in the journal Pediatrics, could help doctors establish the diagnosis of MIS-C and figure out which children are likely to need extra anti-inflammatory treatments. Children with MIS-C often develop cardiac problems and low blood pressure requiring intensive care.

More information about this research here.

Infographic showing CDC criteria for the diagnosis of MIS-C. From Nakra et al via Creative Commons.

Posted on September 8, 2020 by Quinn Eastman in Immunology 4 Comments

Galanin: the ‘keep calm and carry on’ hormone?

A few celebrity neuropeptides have acquired a reputation – sometimes exaggerated — and a flavor, corresponding to their functions in the brain.

Oxytocin has the aura of a “cuddle hormone” because of its role in social bonding and reproduction. Endorphins are the body’s natural pain-killers, long thought to be responsible for “runner’s high.” Hypocretin/orexin, missing in narcolepsy, is a stabilizer of wakefulness as well as motivation.

Galanin, studied by Emory neuroscientist David Weinshenker’s lab, is not as flashy as other neuropeptides. While it is accumulating an intriguing track record, galanin appears to play subtly different roles depending on where it is expressed. It is tempting to call galanin the “keep calm and carry on” hormone, but the research on galanin is so complex it’s difficult to pin down.

Graduate student Rachel Tillage and colleagues have a paper this week in Journal of Neuroscience detailing how galanin’s production by one group of neurons in the brainstem confers stress resilience in mice.

This image shows the rough location for the locus coeruleus in the human brain. In mice, production of galanin in the locus coeruleus cushions against stress.

The new paper shows that exercise increases galanin in the locus coeruleus, a region in the brainstem that produces norepinephrine (important for attention, alertness, anxiety and muscle tone). Galanin can provide protection against the anxiety-inducing effects of artificial but very specific locus coeruleus activation by optogenetics.

Posted on September 3, 2020 by Quinn Eastman in Uncategorized Leave a comment

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