Warren symposium follows legacy of geneticist giant

If we want to understand how the brain creates memories, and how genetic disorders distort the brain’s machinery, then the fragile X gene is an ideal place to start. That’s why the Stephen T. Warren Memorial Symposium, taking place November 28-29 at Emory, will be a significant event for those interested in neuroscience and genetics. Stephen T. Warren, 1953-2021 Warren, the founding chair of Emory’s Department of Human Genetics, led an international team that discovered Read more

Mutations in V-ATPase proton pump implicated in epilepsy syndrome

Why and how disrupting V-ATPase function leads to epilepsy, researchers are just starting to figure Read more

Tracing the start of COVID-19 in GA

At a time when COVID-19 appears to be receding in much of Georgia, it’s worth revisiting the start of the pandemic in early 2020. Emory virologist Anne Piantadosi and colleagues have a paper in Viral Evolution on the earliest SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences detected in Georgia. Analyzing relationships between those virus sequences and samples from other states and countries can give us an idea about where the first COVID-19 infections in Georgia came from. We can draw Read more

Immunology

How CMV gets around

Human cytomegalovirus infects most people in the United States by the time they are 40 years old. HCMV is usually harmless in children and adults, but when pregnant women are infected for the first time, the infection can lead to hearing, vision or other problems in their babies once they are born. [It is also a problem for organ transplant recipients.] According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, HCMV is usually transmitted by sexual contact, diapers or toys. Notably absent are references to needles. That means scientists who study how mouse CMV infection takes place by injecting the virus into the animal’s body are missing a critical step.

Postdoc Lisa Daley-Bauer, working with CMV expert Ed Mocarski, has a recent paper in the journal Cell Host & Microbe illuminating how the virus travels from sites of initial infections to the rest of the body. Defining the cells the virus uses to get around could have implications for efforts to design a HCMV vaccine.

The virus hijacks part of the immune system, the authors find. CMV emits its own attractant (or chemokine) for patrolling monocytes, a type of white blood cell that circulates in the skin and peripheral tissues. This attractant, called MCK2, is only important when mice are infected by footpad inoculation, not by systemic injection.

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Two heavy hitters in this week’s Nature

Two feature articles in Nature this week on work by Emory scientists.

One is from Virginia Hughes (Phenomena/SFARI/MATTER), delving into Kerry Ressler’s and Brian Dias’ surprising discovery in mice that sensitivity to a smell can be inherited, apparently epigenetically. Coincidentally, Ressler will be giving next week’s Dean’s Distinguished Faculty lecture (March 12, 5:30 pm at the School of Medicine).

Another is from Seattle global health writer Tom Paulson, on immunologist Bali Pulendran and using systems biology to unlock new insights into vaccine design.

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Souped-up method for iPS cell reprogramming

Peng Jin and collaborators led by Da-Hua Chen from the Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences have a new paper in Stem Cell Reports. They describe a souped-up method for producing iPS cells (induced pluripotent stem cells).

Production of iPS cells in the laboratory is becoming more widespread. Many investigators, including those at Emory, are using the technology to establish “disease in a dish” models and derive iPS cells from patient donations, turning them into tools for personalized medicine research.

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Posted on by Quinn Eastman in Cancer, Immunology, Neuro Leave a comment

HIV discordant couples

On Thursday, NPR had a nicely done story on discordant couples (one partner is HIV positive, the other is HIV negative) in Kenya.

It provided a reminder of Susan Allen’s work in Rwanda and Zambia with discordant couples. It also very simply laid out the policy issues connected with treating discordant couples:

Medical workers are http://www.raybani.com/ extremely interested in discordant couples for two reasons. One is that almost half of new infections in Kenya happen in these relationships. It’s one place where HIV is spreading. The second reason is that when couples are open with each other about their HIV status, managing HIV is more successful…

The World Health Organization now recommends that any HIV-positive individual in a discordant relationship be supplied HIV treatment. But discordant couples are still being treated on an ad hoc basis in Kenya, primarily because the funding for the medication just isn’t there.

Allen’s research provided critical data about HIV Ray Ban outlet transmission and prevention methods, and led to the adoption of the WHO guidelines mentioned in the story. She has said that the WHO guidelines were designed to help partners in a stable relationship work together to prevent the uninfected person from getting the virus and that low-tech, inexpensive prevention methods like condoms are just as important as antiretroviral therapy in this effort.

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Unexpected effect on flu immunity

Immunologists reported recently that the drug rapamycin, normally used to restrain the immune system after organ transplant, has the unexpected ability to broaden the activity of a flu vaccine.

The results, published in Nature Immunology, indicate that rapamycin steers immune cells away from producing antibodies that strongly target a particular flu strain, in favor of those that block a wide variety of strains. The results could help in the effort to develop a universal flu vaccine.

This study was inspired by a 2009 Nature study from Koichi Araki and Emory Vaccine Center director Rafi Ahmed, reports Jon Cohen in Science magazine. Read more

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Cancer’s shield: PD-1

Gina Kolata has a section front story in Tuesday’s New York Times exploring the potential of a relatively new class of anticancer drugs. The drugs break through “shields” built by cancers to ward off the threat posed by the patient’s immune system. Many are based on blocking PD-1, an immune regulatory molecule whose importance in chronic infections was first defined by Emory’s Rafi Ahmed.

Of course, not every cancer research development described as transformative in the New York Times lives up to the hype. But the clinical trial results, reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, are solid enough that the researchers Kolata talks with think they are seeing “a moment in medical history when everything changed.” [Winship Cancer Institute’s John Kauh was a co-author on one of the 2012 NEJM papers.]

Let’s take a moment to examine some of the roots of this story. Rafi Ahmed didn’t set out to study cancer. For the last two decades, he and his colleagues have been studying T cells, parts of the immune system that are critical for responding to infections. Read more

Posted on by Quinn Eastman in Cancer, Immunology 2 Comments

All about Saccharomyces boulardii

Pediatric infectious disease specialist Tracey Lamb earned recognition this week for her NIH New Innovator award. The goal of Lamb’s project is to develop a probiotic yeast as a platform for inexpensive oral vaccines.

“We have a long way to go to develop this vaccine Magliette Calcio A Poco Prezzo delivery system to the point where it is ready for testing in the clinic,” she says. “Now my lab can undertake more intensive research on this project to demonstrate that our design is effective in protecting against infection.”

Three points:

1. The probiotic yeast Lamb is planning to develop as a vaccine platform is Saccharomyces boulardii, which has been tested in clinical trials as a treatment for gastrointestinal disorders such as Clostridium dificile infection and several forms of diarrhea. It was originally isolated in the 1920s from fruit in Southeast Asia.

2. Saccharomyces boulardii is very close to standard baker’s yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and is actually considered a subspecies of S. cerevisiae. Genomic differences that http://www.magliettedacalcioit.com contribute to its probiotic properties are under investigation.

3. The New Innovator program, running since 2007, is one of the ways the National Institutes of Health seeks to reward especially creative or potentially transformative research proposals. The New Innovator awards, up to $1.5 million over five years, are meant for newly independent researchers building their careers. Lamb managed to snag Emory’s first.

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Mix-and-match immune regulators

Go check out the article on the Emory Office of Technology Transfer’s site on Jacques Galipeau and the artificial chimeric immune stimulators he’s invented. He and his colleagues take one immune regulatory molecule, GM-CSF, and stick it onto others, creating a series of potent immune stimulants he calls “fusokines.” According to Galipeau, one of them turns antibody-producing B cells into The Hulk. Another is like a five hour energy drink.

These super-stimulants may be especially ray ban outlet effective in the realm of cancer, where the immune system is not responding to a stealthy threat. But in dealing with autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis or inflammatory bowel disease, it is more necessary to rein in over-enthusiastic immune cells. Galipeau has devised a fusokine that apparently reprograms cells into being more orderly.

 

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Lampreys hint at origin of ancient immune cells

Lamprey slideStudying lampreys allows biologists to envision the evolutionary past, because they represent an early offshoot of the evolutionary tree, before sharks and fish. Despite their inconspicuous appearance, lampreys have a sophisticated immune system with three types of white blood cell that resemble our B and T cells, researchers have discovered.

Scientists at Emory University School of Medicine and the Max Planck Institute of Immunology and Epigenetics in Freiburg have identified a type of white blood cell in lampreys analogous to the “gamma delta T cells” found in mammals, birds and fish. Gamma delta T cells have specialized roles defending the integrity of the skin and intestines, among other functions.

The results are published in the journal Nature. The finding follows an earlier study showing that cells resembling two main types of white blood cells, B cells and T cells, are present in lampreys.

Read more

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Emory flu researchers support H7N9 plan

Three Emory scientists have signed a letter published last week in Nature and Science outlining proposed research on the H7N9 avian influenza virus. A strain of H7N9 transmitted from poultry to humans was responsible for 43 deaths in China earlier this year, but so far, evidence shows that the virus does not transmit easily from human to human.

The letter advocates additional research including “gain-of-function” experiments: identifying what changes to naturally occurring viral strains would make them more transmissible, deadly, or drug-resistant in mammals.

The group of 23 flu researchers, led by Ron Fouchier at http://www.agfluide.com Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands and Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin, say these types of experiments are needed to help public health authorities prepare for and respond to potential future outbreaks.

The letter signers from Emory are: Walter Orenstein, MD, professor of medicine and principal investigator for the Emory-University of Georgia Influenza Pathogenesis and Immunology Research Center (IPIRC), Richard Compans, PhD, professor of microbiology and immunology and scientific director of IPIRC, and John Steel, PhD, assistant professor of microbiology and immunology. Read more

Posted on by Quinn Eastman in Immunology 1 Comment