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
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Neuro

Debunking detour to DNA

Debunking the idea that most humans only use 10 percent of our brains, which is a starting point for the Scarlett Johansson/Luc Besson movie Lucy, was popular last week.
Many media outlets and popular Web sites took on this task. Emory’s Krish Sathian – known for his work on rehabilitation, how the brain processes sensory experiences and how we understand metaphors – does an able job of it in the video below.

But a related question is still a matter of debate: how much of our DNA do we “use”? This is an important question for geneticists because it seeks to define the most productive mutation hunting grounds.

A study published in PLOS Genetics last week concluded that just 8.2 percent of the human genome is constrained during evolution and is likely to be “functional”. The press release on this paper pointed out sharply that this contrasts with the more expansive analysis from the multinational ENCODE project, which assigned some biochemical function to 80 percent of the human genome.

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Posted on July 29, 2014 by Quinn Eastman in Neuro Leave a comment

Anti-inflammatory drug prevents neuron loss in Parkinson’s model

A lot of evidence has piled up suggesting that inflammation plays a big role in the progression of Parkinson’s.

Immune system genes are linked to disease risk. People who regularly take NSAIDs such as ibuprofen have lower risk. Microglia, the immune system’s ambassadors to the brain, have been observed in PD patients.

Malu Tansey and her postdoc CJ Barnum make a convincing case for an anti-inflammatory — specifically, anti-TNF– therapy to Parkinson’s. They’ve been working with the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research to push this promising approach forward. Please check it out.

Posted on July 25, 2014 by Quinn Eastman in Immunology, Neuro Leave a comment

Rare disease diagnosis, accelerated by social media

Seth Mnookin’s long piece in the New Yorker, on how social media accelerated the diagnosis of several children with a rare genetic disorder, is getting a lot of praise this week. This is the same story that was on CNN.com in March, titled “Kids who don’t cry”, and that Emory Genetics Laboratory director Madhuri Hedge mentioned as a recent diagnostic success for the technique of whole exome sequencing.

Briefly: parents of or doctors treating several children with a previously unknown metabolic disorder, with multiple symptoms — absent tear production, developmental delay, movement deficits, digestive problems etc — found each other via Internet searches/blog posts. The problems were traced back to mutations in the NGLY1 gene.

Emory geneticists Michael Gambello, Melanie Jones (now at the Greenwood Genetic Center in South Carolina) and Hegde are co-authors on the Genetics in Medicine paper that lays everything out scientifically.

Gambello, Jones and Hegde were responsible for sequencing the DNA of a North Georgia family (they live in Jackson County), whose members are mentioned in Mnookin’s piece. The Gambello lab is developing an animal model of NGLY1 deficiency and is studying the mechanisms of how NGLY1 deficiency affects brain development.

Posted on July 18, 2014 by Quinn Eastman in Neuro Leave a comment

Parkinson’s drug discovery: visit the dopamine container store

In a recent PNAS paper, Gary Miller and colleagues at Rollins School of Public Health outline a potential therapeutic approach to Parkinson’s disease that I’m going to call the Container Store approach.

If you have a mess in your kitchen or basement workshop, you might need more or better containers to hold your tools. Analogously, problems in Parkinson’s disease can be traced back to a lack of effective containers for the brain communication chemical dopamine.

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Posted on June 18, 2014 by Quinn Eastman in Neuro Leave a comment

Beyond the usual suspects among Alzheimer’s proteins

If you’ve been paying attention to Alzheimer’s disease research, you’ve probably read a lot about beta-amyloid. It’s a toxic protein fragment that dominates the plaques that appear in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s. Many experimental therapies for Alzheimer’s target beta-amyloid, but so far, they’ve not proven effective.

That could be for several reasons. Maybe those treatments started too late to make a difference. But an increasing number of Alzheimer’s researchers are starting to reconsider the field’s emphasis on amyloid. Nature News has a feature this week explaining how the spotlight is shifting to the protein ApoE, encoded by the gene whose variation is responsible for the top genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s.

In line with this trend, Emory’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center recently received a five-year, $7.2 million grant to go beyond the usual suspects like beta-amyloid. Emory will lead several universities in a project to comprehensively examine proteins altered in Alzheimer’s. You’ve heard of the Cancer Genome Atlas? Think of this as the Alzheimer’s Proteome Atlas, potentially addressing the same kind of questions about which changes are the drivers and which are the passengers.

Emory’s back-to-basics proteomics approach has already yielded some scientific fruit, uncovering changes in proteins involved in RNA splicing and processing. Also, the Nature feature also has some background on a clinical trial called TOMMORROW, which Emory’s ADRC is participating in.

Posted on June 4, 2014 by Quinn Eastman in Neuro Leave a comment

Monitoring the brain’s temperature

It’s been a little while since we had an Intriguing Image. This video illustrates a surgical technique for the treatment of medication-resistant temporal lobe epilepsy.

In this procedure, which is designed to minimize cognitive side effects, the surgeon carefully uses a laser probe to heat and ablate the regions of the brain doctors think are important for seizures. Magnetic resonance imaging allows the temperature in the brain to be precisely monitored. The video was provided by Robert Gross, MD, PhD, and accompanies an upcoming paper in the journal Neurosurgery. More discussion of this procedure here and here.

Posted on May 15, 2014 by Quinn Eastman in Neuro Leave a comment

Progesterone could become tool vs glioblastoma

The hormone progesterone could become part of therapy against the most aggressive form of brain cancer. High concentrations of progesterone kill glioblastoma cells and inhibit tumor growth when the tumors are implanted in mice, researchers have found.

The results were recently published in the Journal of Steroid Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

Glioblastoma is the most common and the most aggressive form of brain cancer in adults, with average survival after diagnosis of around 15 months. Surgery, radiation and chemotherapy do prolong survival by several months, but targeted therapies, which have been effective with other forms of cancer, have not lengthened survival in patients fighting glioblastoma.

The lead author of the current paper is assistant professor of emergency medicine Fahim Atif, PhD. The findings with glioblastoma came out of Emory researchers’ work on progesterone as therapy for traumatic brain injury and more recently, stroke. Atif, Donald Stein and their colleagues have been studying progesterone for the treatment of traumatic brain injury for more than two decades, prompted by Stein’s initial observation that females recover from brain injury more readily than males. There is a similar tilt in glioblastoma as well: primary glioblastoma develops three times more frequently in males compared to females.

These results could pave the way for the use of progesterone against glioblastoma in a human clinical trial, perhaps in combination with standard-of-care therapeutic agents such as temozolomide. However, Stein says that more experiments are necessary with grafts of human tumor cells into animal brains first. His team identified a factor that may be important for clinical trial design: progesterone was not toxic to all glioblastoma cell lines, and its toxicity may depend on whether the tumor suppressor gene p53 is mutated.

Atif, Stein, and colleague Seema Yousuf found that low, physiological doses of progesterone stimulate the growth of glioblastoma tumor cells, but higher doses kill the tumor cells while remaining nontoxic for healthy cells. Similar effects have been seen with the progesterone antagonist RU486, but the authors cite evidence that progesterone is less toxic to healthy cells. Progesterone has also been found to inhibit growth of neuroblastoma cells (neuroblastoma is the most common cancer in infants), as well as breast, ovarian and colon cancers in cell culture and animal models.

 

Posted on May 14, 2014 by Quinn Eastman in Cancer, Neuro Leave a comment

Valproate: epigenetic solvent

Oncologist Johann Brandes and colleagues from Winship Cancer Institute have a recent study on the preventive effects of valproate, now prescribed for epilepsy and bipolar disorder, against head and neck cancer.

Published in Cancer, it was a clever example of number crunching, using data from the Veterans’ Administration. If you want to know about the anticancer effects of a widely used drug, check who’s already taking it for another reason (25,000 veterans were taking it). The results suggest that valproate – OR a drug that works with a similar mechanism – might be used to prevent head and neck cancer in patients who are at high risk. Also see this related paper from Brandes and colleagues on chemoprevention in lung cancer.

However, any examination of valproate should take into account neurologist Kim Meador’s work on antiepileptic drugs taken by pregnant women — he was at Emory for several years but recently moved to Stanford. His work with the NEAD study definitively showed that valproate, taken during pregnancy, increases the risk of birth defects and intellectual disability in children.

There’s even more about valproate: it might help tone-deaf adults learn to differentiate musical tones, according to one study. It has been used to enhance the reprogramming of somatic cells into induced pluripotent stem cells. It seems that valproate just shakes things up, turning on genes that have been off, erasing decisions that cells have already made.

Valproate is a tricky drug, with several modes of action: it blocks sodium channels, enhances the effects of the inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA, and inhibits histone deacetylases. Although the first two may be contributing to the antiepileptic effects, the last one may be contributing to longer-lasting changes. Histone deacetylases are a way a cell keeps genes turned off; inhibit them and you loosen things up, allowing the remodeling of chromatin and unearthing genes that were silenced.

In tumors, genes that prevent runaway growth are silenced. It may be that valproate is loosening chromatin enough to allow the growth control machinery to reemerge, although the effects observed in the Brandes paper are specific for head and neck cancer, and not other forms of cancer. The data suggest that valproate has a preventive effect with respect to smoking-related cancers and not viral-related cancers.

With adults at high risk of cancer recurrence, side effects from valproate may be more acceptable than in other situations. Even so, with follow-up research, it may be possible to isolate where the anticancer effects of valproate come from – that is, which histone deacetylase in particular is responsible – find a more specific drug, and avoid potential broad side effects.

Posted on April 1, 2014 by Quinn Eastman in Cancer, Neuro Leave a comment

Hypersomnia update: beyond subject one

It’s not sleep apnea. It’s not narcolepsy. Hypersomnia is a different kind of sleep disorder. There’s even an “apples and oranges” T-shirt (see below) that makes that point.

This weekend, your correspondent attended a patient-organized Living with Hypersomnia conference. One of the main purposes of the conference was to update sufferers and supporters on the state of research at Emory and elsewhere, but there was also a lot of community building — hence the T-shirts.

The story of how sleep took over one young lawyer’s life, and how her life was then transformed by flumazenil, a scarce antidote to sleeping pills she was not taking, has received plenty of attention.

Now an increasing number of people are emerging who have a condition similar to Anna Sumner’s, and several questions need answers. Read more

Posted on March 11, 2014 by Quinn Eastman in Neuro 7 Comments

NMDA receptors: triple-quadruple axel

NMDA receptors are saddled with an unwieldy name, but they are some of the most important* signaling molecules in the brain, both for learning and memory and in neurological and psychiatric diseases.

Kasper Hansen, a postdoc from Stephen Traynelis’ lab who is establishing his own at the University of Montana, is lead author on a recent paper in Neuron, which could spur research on NMDA receptors’ pharmacological properties.

The NMDA receptors in the brain are actually mix-and-match assemblies of four subunits, and most of the time in the brain, three different proteins come together to make one receptor, the authors explain. In the laboratory, it has been easier to study simpler, more homogenous, but also more artificial constructs. Hansen and his colleagues developed a way to build replicas of the more complicated NMDA receptors found in the brain and probe their distinct responses to drugs. Read more

Posted on March 6, 2014 by Quinn Eastman in Neuro Leave a comment
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