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

Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

Fragile but potent: RNA delivered by nanoparticle

An intriguing image for November comes from biomedical engineer Mike Davis’ lab, courtesy of BME graduate student Inthirai Somasuntharam.

Each year, thousands of children undergo surgery for congenital heart defects. A child’s heart is more sensitive to injury caused by interrupting blood flow during surgery, and excess reactive oxygen species are a key source of this damage.

Macrophages with blue nuclei and red cytoskeletons, being treated with green nano particles. The particles carry RNA that shut off reactive oxygen species production.

Macrophages with blue nuclei and red cytoskeletons, being treated with green nano particles. The particles carry RNA that shut off reactive oxygen species production.

Davis and his colleagues are able to shut off cheap oakley reactive oxygen species at the source by targeting the NOX (NADPH oxidase*) enzymes that produce them. This photo, from a 2013 Biomaterials paper, shows green fluorescent nanoparticles carrying small interfering RNA. The RNA precisely shuts down one particular gene encoding a NOX enzyme. Eventually, similar nanoparticles may shield the heart from damage during pediatric heart surgery.

In the paper, Somasuntharam used particles made of a slowly dissolving polymer called polyketals. The particles delivered fragile but potent RNA molecules into macrophages, inflammatory cells that swarm into cardiac tissue after a heart attack. Davis and Georgia Tech colleague Niren Murthy previously harnessed this polymer to deliver drugs that can be toxic to the rest of the body.

The polyketal particles are especially well-suited for delivering a payload to macrophages, since those types of cells (as the name implies) are big eaters. Davis reports his lab has been working on customizing the particles so they can deliver RNA molecules into cardiac muscle cells as well.

*While we’re on the topic of NADPH oxidases, Susan Smith and David Lambeth have been looking for and finding potential drugs that inhibit them.

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Packaging stem cells in capsules for heart therapy

Stem cell therapy for heart disease is happening. Around the world, thousands of heart disease patients have been treated in clinical studies with some form of bone marrow cells or stem cells. But in many of those studies, the actual impact on heart function was modest or inconsistent. One reason is that most of the cells either don’t stay in the heart or die soon after being introduced into the body.

Cardiology researchers at Emory have a solution for this problem. The researchers package stem cells in a capsule made of alginate, a gel-like substance. Once packaged, the cells stay put, releasing their healing factors over time.

Researchers used encapsulated mesenchymal stem cells to form a “patch” that was applied to the hearts of rats after a heart attack. Compared with animals treated with naked cells (or with nothing), rats treated with the capsule patches displayed increased heart function, reduced scar size and more growth of new blood vessels a month later. In addition, many more of the encapsulated cells stayed alive. Read more

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Molecular beacons shine path to cardiac muscle repair

Pure cardiac muscle cells, ready to transplant into a patient affected by heart disease.

That’s a goal for many cardiology researchers working with stem cells. Having a pure population of cardiac muscle cells is essential for avoiding tumor formation after transplantation, but has been technically challenging.

CardioMBs

Fluorescent beacons that distinguish cardiac muscle cells

Researchers at Emory and Georgia Tech have developed a method for Cheap Oakleys purifying cardiac muscle cells from stem cell cultures using molecular beacons.

Molecular beacons are tiny “instruments” that become fluorescent only when they find cells that have turned on certain genes. In this case, they target instructions to make a type of myosin, a protein found in cardiac muscle cells.

Doctors could use purified cardiac muscle cells to heal damaged areas of the heart in patients affected by heart attack and heart failure. In addition, the molecular beacons technique http://www.lependart.com could have broad applications across regenerative medicine, because it could be used with other types of cells produced from stem cell cultures, such as brain cells or insulin-producing islet cells.

The results are published in the journal Circulation.

“Often, we want to generate a particular cell population from stem cells for introduction into patients,” says co-senior author Young-sup Yoon, MD, PhD, professor of medicine (cardiology) and director of stem cell biology at Emory University School of Medicine. “But the desired cells often lack a readily accessible surface marker, or that marker is not specific enough, as is the case for cardiac muscle cells. This technique could allow us to purify almost any type of cell.”

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Dynamic functional connectivity

How can neuroscientists tell that distant parts of the brain are talking to each other?

They can look for a physical connection, like neurons that carry signals between the two. They could probe the brain with electricity. However, to keep the brain intact and examine cheap oakley function in a living person or animal, a less invasive approach may be in order.

Looking for functional connectivity has grown in popularity in recent years. This is a way of analyzing fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scans, which measure activity in the brain by looking at changes in blood oxygen. If two regions of the brain “light up” at the same time, and do so in a consistent enough pattern, that indicates that those two regions are connected.*

Functional connectivity networks

Shella Keilholz and her colleagues have been looking at functional connectivity data very closely, and how the apparent connections fluctuate over short time periods. This newer form of analysis is called “dynamic” or “time-varying” functional connectivity. Functional connectivity analyses can be performed while the person or animal in the scanner is at rest, not doing anything complicated.

“Even if you’re lying in the scanner daydreaming, your mind is jumping around,” she says. “But the way neuroscientists usually average fMRI data over several minutes means losing lots of information.”

Keilholz is part of the Wallace H Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory. She participated in a workshop at the most recent Human Brain Mapping meeting in Seattle devoted to the topic. She says neuroscientists have already started using dynamic functional connectivity to detect differences in the brain’s network properties in schizophrenia. However, some of that information may be noise. Skeptical tests have shown that head motion or breathing can push scientists into inferring connections that aren’t really there. For dynamic analysis especially, preprocessing can lead to apparent correlations between two randomly matched signals.

“I got into this field as a skeptic,” she says. “Several years ago, I didn’t believe functional connectivity really reflects coordinated brain activity.”

Now Keilholz and her colleagues have shown for the first time that dynamic functional connectivity data is “grounded”, because it is linked with changes in electrical signals within the brain. The results were published in July in the journal NeuroImage. The first author is graduate student Garth Thompson. Read more

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The next generation of biomedical engineering innovators

Congratulations to the winners of the InVenture innovation competition at Georgia Tech. The competition aired Wednesday night on Georgia Public Broadcasting. The winners get cash prizes, a free patent filing and commercialization service through Georgia Tech’s Office of Technology Transfer.

Several of the teams have Emory connections, through the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory, and the Atlanta Clinical & Translational Science Institute.

Emergency medical professionals know that intubation can be rough. The second place ($10,000) MAID team created a “magnetic assisted intubation device” that helps them place a breathing tube into the trachea in a smoother way. The MAID was designed by Alex Cooper, Shawna Hagen, William Thompson and Elizabeth Flanagan, all biomedical engineering majors. Their clinical advisor was Brian Morse, MD, previously a trauma fellow and now an Emory School of Medicine surgical critical care resident at Grady Memorial Hospital.

“When I first saw the device that the students had developed, I was blown away,” Morse told the Technique newspaper. “It’s probably going to change the way we look at intubation in the next five to 10 years.”

The AutoRhexis team, which won the People’s Choice award ($5,000), invented a device to perform the most difficult step during cataract removal surgery. It was designed by a team of biomedical and mechanical engineering majors: Chris Giardina, Rebeca Bowden, Jorge Baro, Kanitha Kim, Khaled Kashlan and Shane Saunders. They were advised by Tim Johnson, MD, who was an Emory medical student and is now a resident at Columbus Regional Medical Center.

The finalist Proximer team, advised by Emory surgeon Albert Losken, MD, developed a way to detect plastics in the body, which can help breast cancer survivors undergoing reconstruction.

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Emory/Georgia Tech: partners in creating heart valve repair devices

Vinod Thourani, associate professor of cardiac surgery at Emory School of Medicine, along with Jorge Jimenez and Ajit Yoganathan, biomedical engineers at Georgia Tech and Emory, have been teaming up to invent new devices for making heart valve repair easier.

At the Georgia Bio and Atlanta Clinical and Translational Science Institute’s second annual conference on academic/industry partnerships, Thourani described how he and his colleagues developed technology that is now being commercialized.

Apica Cardiovascular co-founders (l-r) James Greene, Vinod Thourani, Jorge Jimenez and Ajit Yoganathan

Apica Cardiovascular was founded based on technology invented by Jimenez, Thourani, Yoganathan and Thomas Vassiliades, a former Emory surgeon.

Thourani is associate director of the Structural Heart Program at Emory.

Yoganathan is director of the Cardiovascular Fluid Mechanics Laboratory at Georgia Tech and the Center for Innovative Cardiovascular Technologies.

The technology simplifies and standardizes a technique for accessing the heart via the apex, the tip of the heart’s cone pointing down and to the left. This allows a surgeon to enter the heart, deliver devices such as heart valves or left ventricular assist devices, and get out again, all without loss of blood or sutures.

Schematic of transapical aortic valve implantation. The prosthesis is implanted within the native annulus by balloon inflation.

At the conference, Thourani recalled that the idea for the device came when he described a particularly difficult surgical case to Jimenez.  Thourani said that a principal motivation for the device came for the need to prevent bleeding after the valve repair procedure is completed.

With research and development support from the Coulter Foundation Translational Research Program and the Georgia Research Alliance VentureLab program, the company has already completed a series of pre-clinical studies to test the functionality of their device and its biocompatibility.

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Stem cell research center gets NSF support

Stem cell research is on the verge of impacting many elements of medicine, but scientists haven’t yet worked out the processes needed to manufacture sufficient quantities of stem cells for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes.

Todd McDevitt and Robert Nerem

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $3 million to Georgia Tech to fund a center that will develop engineering methods for stem cell production. The program’s co-leaders are Todd McDevitt, PhD, an associate professor in the Georgia Tech/Emory Department of Biomedical Engineering and Robert Nerem, director of the Emory/Georgia Tech Center for Regenerative Medicine (GTEC), which will administer the award.

“Successfully integrating knowledge of stem cell biology with bioprocess engineering and process development is the challenging goal of this program,” says McDevitt.

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Staring (cell) death in the face: imaging agents for necrotic cells

DNA usually occupies a privileged place inside the cell. Although cells in our body die all the time, an orderly process of disassembly (programmed cell death or apoptosis) generally keeps cellular DNA from leaking all over the place. DNA’s presence outside the cell means something is wrong: tissue injury has occurred and cells are undergoing necrosis.

Researchers from the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University have devised a way to exploit the properties of extracellular DNA to create an imaging agent for injured tissue. Niren Murthy and Mike Davis recently published a paper in Organic Letters describing the creation of “Hoechst-IR.” This imaging agent essentially consists of the DNA-binding compound Hoechst 33258 (often used to stain cells before microscopy), attached to a dye that is visible in the near-infrared range. A water-loving polymer chain between the two keeps the new molecule from crossing cell membranes and binding DNA inside the cell.

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GRA partnership promotes research collaboration, grows economy

“Other states wish they had what Georgia has: Research universities that work together, and a unified commitment from industry, government and academia to grow a technology-based economy,” states Michael Cassidy, president and CEO of the Georgia Research Alliance (GRA) in the GRA’s recent annual report.”

As one of six GRA universities, Emory has benefited from this unique partnership in numerous ways: through its 11 Eminent Scholars, multidisciplinary university and industry collaborations, and support for research in vaccines, nanomedicine, transplantation, neurosciences, pediatrics, biomedical engineering, clinical research, and drug discovery.

Emory is featured throughout the report, including

  • The Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory and its four eminent scholars, Xiaoping Hu, PhD, Eberhard Voit, PhD, Barbara Boyan, PhD and Don Giddens, PhD.
  • Emory transplant medicine expert and GRA Eminent Scholar Allan Kirk, MD, PhD, who collaborates with Andrew Mellor, PhD at the Medical College of Georgia on research to find enzymes that could keep the body from rejecting newly transplanted organs.
  • The Emory-University of Georgia Influenza Center of Excellence and its leading collaborators, GRA Eminent Scholar and Emory Vaccine Center Director Rafi Ahmed, PhD, and Emory microbiologist Richard Compans, PhD, along with UGA GRA Eminent Scholar Ralph Tripp.
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