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

Heart

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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Possible diabetes drug/stent interaction

Diabetes and heart disease often intersect. Emory cardiologist Aloke Finn and his colleagues recently had two papers in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology and in Atherosclerosis describing a possible interaction between the widely used diabetes drug metformin and drug-eluting stents, which are used to to treat coronary artery disease. Anwer Habib, MD is the first author of both papers.

The stent props the once-blocked artery open while the drugs in the stents are supposed to prevent the artery from becoming blocked again. The drugs — usually mTOR inhibitors such as http://www.magliettedacalcioit.com everolimus or the newer zotarolimus — slow down cell growth, but this cuts both ways. The drugs slow down the recovery of the lining of the blood vessel and this may contribute to blood clot formation after stent placement.

In cultured human cells and in rabbits with implanted stents, Finn and colleagues showed that metformin augmented the effect of mTOR inhibitors on regrowth of the blood vessel lining. (However — the authors acknowledge that their animal model was not diabetic or atherosclerotic.)

The findings could mean that people taking metformin would need to take medications to prevent blood clotting medications for a longer time after stent placement. The authors say that clinical studies following patients who receive drug-eluting stents should look at metformin’s effects on blood clotting events. A study examining drug eluting stents in diabetic patients is in the works at Emory.

 

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Stress of public speaking mobilizes progenitor cells from bone marrow

The stress of public speaking is enough to drive damage-repairing progenitor cells out of the bone marrow into the blood, a study of patients with heart disease has found.

Public speaking raises the blood pressure -- it also drives progenitor cells out of the bone marrow

Public speaking raises the blood pressure — it also drives progenitor cells out of the bone marrow

Endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) are found in the bone marrow, and thought to repair damaged blood vessels once mobilized into the blood by injury or stress. Previous research has shown that strenuous exercise can lead to a dramatic increase in blood EPC levels, but the effects of psychological stress on EPCs had not been examined before.

This report emerges Magliette Calcio A Poco Prezzo from a large NHLBI-funded study of mental stress ischemia previously described in Emory Public Health magazine.

The new findings were presented Saturday, March 9 at the American College of Cardiology conference in San Francisco. The presenter was cardiovascular research fellow Ronnie Ramadan, MD. Senior authors are Arshed Quyyumi, MD, professor of medicine and director of the Emory Cardiovascular Research Institute, and Viola Vaccarino, MD, PhD, professor and chair of the Department of Epidemiology, Rollins School of Public Health.

In some patients with coronary artery disease, mental stress may precipitate ischemia– a deficiency in blood flow to the heart – a risk factor for adverse events and death independent of other cardiovascular risk factors such as smoking, cholesterol and diabetes.

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Editorial on bilateral vs single coronary bypass surgery

John Puskas, chief of cardiac surgery at Emory University Hospital Midtown, recently had an editorial in the journal Circulation on the topic of coronary bypass surgery.

John Puskas, MD

Specifically, he says that many cardiac surgeons are reluctant to employ bilateral internal thoracic artery grafts (as opposed to a single graft), even though there is a long-term benefit, because of perceived risk of infection and suboptimal financial incentives.

Puskas’ key message paragraph was so clear that it demands reposting here:

Why are American surgeons doing so few BITA [bilateral internal thoracic artery] grafts? Fundamentally, U.S. surgeons are responding to their practice environment, especially to a fear of deep sternal wound infection in an increasingly obese, diabetic population of patients. The surgeon pays a large and immediate political price for a deep sternal wound infection and receives relatively little credit for the extra years that BITA grafting adds to a patient’s life in the future. There is also a relative Ray Ban outlet financial disincentive to perform BITA grafting: incremental payment for the second internal thoracic artery graft is small considering the extra time required in the operating room. Moreover, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services no longer reimburse for extra care necessary for treatment of mediastinitis [internal chest inflammation/infection] after cardiac surgery, because this is now deemed a never event. Thus, surgeons, who are increasingly employed by hospitals and hospital systems, are under intense pressure to perform CABG surgery that is safe and cost-effective according to short-term metrics.

Puskas and his colleagues have published an analysis of bilateral vs single grafting at Emory, as well as a proposed metric for when single grafting should be used in the context of patients with diabetes:

Our present practice is generally to use BITA grafting in patients who are <75 years, have suitable coronary artery targets, are not morbidly obese, and whose glycosylated hemoglobin level is <7.0% to 7.5%.

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AHA meeting highlights — an Emory-centric view

Poring over the abundance of information presented at major scientific meetings is like trying to drink from a firehose.  Imposing an Emory-centric filter on this year’s American Heart Association Scientific Sessions meeting in Los Angeles, here are three highlights, with a shoutout to the AHA journal Circulation, which provides a database of meeting abstracts.

Alginate encapsulation, a therapeutic delivery tactic to get stem cells to stay in the heart

Presenter Rebecca Levit, MD, a postdoc in cardiology division chair W. Robert Taylor’s laboratory, was a finalist for an Early Career Investigator Award.

 Stem cell therapies for myocardial repair have shown promise in preclinical trials, but lower than expected retention and viability of transplanted cells. In an effort to improve this, we employed an alginate encapsulation strategy for human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) and attached them to the heart with a biocompatible PEG hydrogel patch in a rat MI model. Encapsulation allows for diffusion of pro-angiogenic cytokines and growth factors made by the hMSCs while maintaining them at the site of implantation…Alginate encapsulated hMSCs attached to the heart with a hydrogel patch resulted in a highly significant improvement in left ventricular function after acute myocardial infarction. The mechanism for this markedly enhanced effect appears to be increased cell survival and retention.

 Note: alginate already has a wide variety of uses, for example in culinary arts and to make dental impressions.

suPAR, a biomarker connected with depression, inflammation and cardiovascular outcomes. Step back, C-reactive protein

Depression, inflammation (Manocha, Vaccarino)

Cardiovascular outcomes (Eapen, Quyyumi)

Coronary microvascular dysfunction (Corban, Samady)

Predicting mental-stress myocardial ischemia via a public speaking test

A study probing myocardial ischemia (a lack of blood flow to the heart) induced by psychological stress, described in this Emory Public Health article. The presentation by Ronnie Ramadan examines physiological responses to a public speaking test as a way of predicting more severe problems.

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FAME 2 clarifies benefits of coronary stents

Who should get stents, the tiny metal tubes designed to keep clogged coronary arteries open? Someone who is having a heart attack certainly should, and the life-prolonging benefits have been demonstrated in several studies. But results have been more ambiguous for patients who have “stable angina”: chest pain that comes with exertion but goes away at rest.

Kreton Mavromatis, MD

A recent study addressing this topic called FAME 2 has received extensive media coverage. It was published in the New England Journal of Medicine and also presented at the European Society of Cardiology meeting in Munich. Kreton Mavromatis, MD, director of cardiac catheterization at the Atlanta VA Medical Center and assistant professor of medicine at Emory, was a co-author on the NEJM paper.

In the new study, researchers used a technique called fractional flow reserve (FFR) to decide if someone with stable angina should get a stent, or receive medical therapy with drugs such as aspirin and statins. Conventionally, X-ray coronary angiography is used to assess the need for a stent.

FFR involves introducing a pressure sensor via guidewire into the coronary artery, to measure how much blood flow is being blocked. FAME 2 was sponsored by St Jude Medical, a company that makes guidewire equipment for use in FFR.

Fractional flow reserve is a way of assessing the effects of blockages in blood flow in a coronary artery.

The clinical trial was stopped early because of clear differences in the rates of hospitalization (4 percent for stents against 13 percent for medical therapy)

“FAME 2 showed that the strategy of treating stable ischemic heart disease with FFR-guided coronary stenting reduces the combination of death, MI and urgent revascularization as compared with strategy of medical therapy alone,” Mavromatis says. “This benefit was specifically due to the reduced need of urgent revascularization due to acute coronary syndrome, a dramatic event for our patients.”

Some cardiologists have criticized the FAME 2 study, noting that the benefits of stenting didn’t come in terms of reducing “hard events” (deaths and heart attacks).

“It is important to recognize that less symptoms of angina and less chance of hospitalization are tremendous benefits that our patients really appreciate,” Mavromatis says. “I think FFR will play a bigger role in evaluating and treating coronary artery disease, as it can direct stenting much more precisely than angiography toward clinically important coronary artery disease, improving patients’ outcomes and saving money.”

The FFR procedure costs several hundred dollars but that is significantly less than the cost of implanting a coronary stent. Habib Samady, MD, director of interventional cardiology at Emory, has also been an advocate for the use of FFR to select who would benefit from a coronary stent. He wrote an article describing its uses in 2009:

We have been using and advocating FFR since pressure guidewire technology first came to the U.S. in 1998. At Emory, we are sometimes asked to reevaluate patients who have been slated for CABG surgery at another hospital where recommendations are made based on angiography alone. When we evaluate these cases using FFR, we are sometimes able to recommend courses of treatment that involve fewer stents or even medical therapy. Occasionally, based on FFR data, we send our patients for an endoscopic or “minimally invasive” bypass and stent the remaining narrowings.

In addition, FFR has helped reduce the number of multi-vessel PCIs performed. Patients who might have received stents in three vessels after angiography alone would likely receive stents in only one or two vessels after FFR-guided analysis. Among patients with single-vessel disease, FFR often has allowed us to recommend medical treatment in lieu of stenting. Implanting fewer stents also means using less contrast agent and fewer materials, which lowers the expenses involved in treatment.

A large, multi-center study called ISCHEMIA is starting that will address the coronary stent vs medical therapy issue in a more definitive way. Both Emory and the Atlanta VA Medical Center are participating. “This is a very important next step in understanding the benefits of invasive therapy of stable ischemic heart disease,” Mavromatis says.

 

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Low vitamin D in people with HIV: links to heart risk, immune function

In people with HIV, low vitamin D levels have been linked to thicker carotid arteries as well as a weaker comeback for the immune system after starting antiretroviral therapy.

These results, published online recently in the journal Antiviral Therapy, are the first to confirm an association between low vitamin D levels and a measure of higher cardiovascular risk in people with HIV. They also suggest that the benefits of vitamin D supplementation for people with HIV should be evaluated in a clinical trial.

Allison Ross, MD, is an infectious disease specialist in the Department of Pediatrics and the Emory-Children's Pediatric Research Center.

The advent of effective antiretroviral therapy against HIV has dramatically improved life expectancies for people with HIV over the last 15 years. The presence of HIV is known to perturb cardiovascular health, even in the absence of an active infection. Since vitamin D levels are known to have an impact on the immune system and cardiovascular disease risk, that drove infectious disease specialist Allison Ross and her colleagues to probe these connections in people living with HIV. The results were also described on the Web sites AidsMeds and NAM/AidsMap.

Ross studied a group of HIV-positive people enrolled in Case Western Reserve University’s HIV clinic in Cleveland. Colleagues from Emory and Case Western were co-authors.

They tested vitamin D levels, immune function and heart health in 149 HIV-positive people and a matched group of 34 HIV-negative people. Vitamin D levels were significantly lower in the HIV-positive group, even when controlling for known factors that affect vitamin D.

The researchers looked at how much the immune system was able to come back after starting retroviral therapy. This involves comparing someone’s lowest ever CD4 T cell count from the current CD4 count. They found that people with the poorest level of immune restoration were the most likely to have the lowest level of vitamin D. In addition, people with the lowest vitamin D levels were more than 10 times as likely to have thickening of the carotid arteries, as measured by ultrasound.

Inflammation can be a driving factor for heart disease, but in the study, low vitamin D was not linked to higher levels of inflammation markers. Additional research could determine whether those who are starting antiretroviral therapy would see better immune recovery if they took a vitamin D supplement.

Researchers at Emory have been investigating several aspects of low Vitamin D levels and their impact on health, including a connection with Parkinson’s disease. Endocrinologist Vin Tangpricha notes that Emory studies are looking at vitamin D in the context of tuberculosis, sepsis, sickle cell disease, cancer, cystic fibrosis and pain sensitivity.

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Nitrite: from cured meat to protected heart

Nitrite may be best known as a food additive used in cured meats such as hot dogs, but medical researchers are studying how it could treat several conditions, including preventing damage to the heart after a heart attack.

Leaders in the nitrite field are meeting May 11 -13, 2011 at Emory Conference Center in Atlanta. One of the lead organizers is David Lefer, PhD, professor of surgery at Emory University School of Medicine and director of the Cardiothoracic Research Laboratory. Lefer discusses the beneficial effects of nitrite in the video below. More information about the meeting is available here.

Scientists think supplying a pulse of nitrite can reduce injury to heart tissue coming from the interruption of blood flow. Several clinical trials are now investigating nitrite as a therapy for conditions such as heart attack, ruptured aneurysm, sickle cell pain crisis and cardiac arrest.

Nitrite acts as the body’s reserve for nitric oxide, which turns on chemical pathways that relax blood vessels. Delivering nitric oxide directly into the body is expensive and hard to control. Unlike nitric oxide, whose lifetime in the body is a few seconds, nitrite is stable and stored in the body’s tissues and can be delivered in a variety of ways. It is converted into nitric oxide under conditions when the body needs it: lack of blood or oxygen. In addition, sodium nitrite has been used as part of a cyanide antidote kit. This means that safety data on large doses of nitrite in critically ill people is available.

In a 2005 paper published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Lefer and colleagues showed that nitrite can reduce damage to the hearts of mice after a simulated heart attack. More recently, assistant professor John Calvert and Lefer have shown that internally generated and stored nitrite is an important way that exercise protects the heart from a heart attack.

Some blood pressure studies underway in Europe have participants consume large amounts of beet juice as their source of nitrate, which is then converted to nitrite in the body.

A wave of public concern about nitrite and its relative nitrate in the 1970s focused on their presence in cured meats and their ability to form nitrosamines, which can be carcinogenic. Subsequent investigation showed that actually, most of the nitrite and nitrate in the average adult’s diet come from vegetables such as broccoli and spinach, and that antioxidants such as vitamin C can prevent nitrosamine formation.

Nathan Bryan, a speaker at the conference from UT-Houston, was featured in a recent television news story about herbal supplements designed to boost nitrite in the body.

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Caution on cardiovascular cell therapies

The technique of using someone’s own bone marrow cells to treat disease may present risks of promoting tumor development, according to a recent paper from Emory stem cell expert Young-sup Yoon and his colleagues.

Young-sup Yoon, MD, PhD

The results of Yoon’s experiments, performed in mice, provide a cautionary message for researchers interested in developing cardiovascular cell therapies in humans. They suggest that careful monitoring for chromosomal abnormalities is warranted when bone marrow cells are used for cell therapies. Chromosomal abnormalities, which lead to tumor formation, may be introduced during the time when the cells are grown outside the body, the authors suggest.

Yoon and his colleagues were using mesenchymal stem cells derived from bone marrow to treat heart attack and diabetic neuropathy in mouse models. These are cells that have partially differentiated but still have the capacity to develop into different cell types, such as stromal cells, which support blood development, as well as bone and fat. If you are exploring ways to support nerve health, you may consider neuropathy supplements. Here’s what happened (from the paper’s abstract):

During the follow-up at 4 to 8 weeks after cell transplantation, growing tumors were observed in 30% of hearts in the MI [heart attack] model, and in 46% of hindlimbs in the diabetic neuropathy model.

Importantly, these were not embryonic stem cells or an emerging alternative, induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells). Researchers working with iPS cells have shown that the process of reprogramming them can also be imperfect.

Double asterix marks a tumor that appeared in a mouse’s heart after mesenchymal stem cell transplantation

Although the authors note that the chromosomal abnormalities they observed are usually more common in mouse cells than in human cells, Yoon says whether the effects will also be seen with human cells is still an open question. Looking ahead, using cells that have been grown in culture dishes for only a short time or not at all may be advisable, he says.

“At present, only careful karyotyping [examining and counting cells’ chromosomes] before cell transplantation would be a preventive measure,” he adds.

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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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