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
•••

osteoporosis

Immune studies suggest remedies for parathyroid hormone-driven bone loss

A common cause of bone loss is an overactive parathyroid gland, which doctors usually treat with surgery. New research on how excess parathyroid hormone affects immune cells suggests that doctors could repurpose existing drugs to treat hyperparathyroidism without surgery.

The results were published October 8 in Cell Metabolism. [My apologies for not posting this in October.]

“Surgery is sometimes not an appropriate remedy for hyperparathyroidism because of the condition of the patient, and it is also expensive,” says lead author Roberto Pacifici, MD. “Also, the one pharmacological treatment that is available, cinacalcet, is not always the ideal solution. This work could potentially lead to alternatives.”

Roberto Pacifici, MD

Researchers at Emory University School of Medicine led by Pacifici teamed up with doctors from the University of Turin in Italy, combining observations of human patients with an overactive parathyroid with experiments on mice.

The drugs identified as potential treatments are: calcium channel blockers, now used to treat high blood pressure, and antibodies that block the inflammatory molecule IL-17A, under development for the skin disease psoriasis. Clinical trials would be necessary to show that these drugs are effective against parathyroid hormone-induced bone loss in humans. Read more

Posted on November 19, 2015 by Quinn Eastman in Immunology Leave a comment

Bone-strengthening particles stimulate autophagy

Neale Weitzmann and George Beck have been publishing a series of papers describing how silica nanoparticles can increase bone mineral density in animals. Their findings could someday form the basis for a treatment for osteoporosis.

In 2012, we posted an article and video on this topic. We wanted to call attention to a few of the team’s recent papers, one of which probes the mechanism for a remarkable phenomenon: how can very fine silica particles stimulate bone formation?

The particles’ properties seem to depend on their size: 50 nanometers wide – smaller than a HIV or influenza vision. In a 2014 ACS Nano paper, Beck, Weitzmann and postdoc Shin-Woo Ha show that the particles interact with particular proteins involved in the process of autophagy, a process of “self digestion” induced by stress.

“These studies suggest that it is not the material per se that stimulates autophagy but rather size or shape,” they write. Read more

Posted on July 6, 2015 by Quinn Eastman in Uncategorized Leave a comment

PTH for stroke: stem cells lite

I’d like to highlight a paper in PLOS One from anesthesiologists Shan Ping Yu and Ling Wei’s group that was published earlier this year. [Sorry for missing it then!] They are investigating potential therapies for stroke, long a frustrating area of clinical research. The “clot-busting” drug tPA remains the only FDA-approved therapy, despite decades of work on potential neuroprotective agents.

Yu’s team takes a different tactic. They seek to bolster the brain’s recovery powers after stroke by mobilizing endogenous progenitor cells. I will call this approach “stem cells lite.”

journal.pone.0087284.g006

PTH appears to encourage new neurons in recovery in a mouse model of ischemic stroke. Green = recent cell division, red = neuronal marker

It is similar to that taken by cardiologist Arshed Quyyumi and colleagues with peripheral artery disease: use a growth factor (GM-CSF), which is usually employed for another purpose, to get the body’s own regenerative agents to emerge from the bone marrow.

In this case, Yu’s team was using parathyroid hormone (PTH), which is an FDA-approved treatment for osteoporosis. They administered it, beginning one hour after loss of blood flow, in a mouse model of ischemic stroke. They found that daily treatment with PTH spurs production of endogenous regenerative factors in the stroke-affected area of the brain. They observed both increased new neuron formation and sensorimotor functional recovery. However, PTH does not pass through the blood-brain barrier and does not change the size of the stroke-affected area, the researchers found.

The conclusion of the paper hints at their next steps:

As this is the first report on this PTH therapy for ischemic stroke for the demonstration of the efficacy and feasibility, PTH treatment was initiated at 1 hr after stroke followed by repeated administrations for 6 days. We expect that even more delayed treatment of PTH, e.g. several hrs after stroke, can be beneficial in promoting chronic angiogenesis and other tissue repair processes. This possibility, however, remains to be further evaluated in a more translational investigation.

Posted on September 17, 2014 by Quinn Eastman in Neuro 1 Comment