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
•••

pathology

Microbiome enthusiasm at Emory

At what point did the human microbiome become such a hot topic?

When it was shown that babies born by Cesarean section are colonized with different bacteria than those born vaginally? With the cardiovascular studies of microbial byproducts of meat digestion? With the advent of fecal transplant as a proposed treatment for Clostricium difficile infection?

The bacteria and other microbes that live within the human body are thought to influence not only digestive health, but metabolic and autoimmune diseases as well, possibly even psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders. The field is being propelled by next-generation sequencing technology, and Nature had to publish an editorial guarding against hype (a major theme: correlation is not causation).

At Emory, investigators from several departments are involved in microbiome-related work, and the number is expanding, and assembling a comprehensive list is becoming more difficult. Researchers interested in the topic are planning Emory’s first microbiome symposium in November, organized by Jennifer Mulle (read her intriguing review on autism spectrum disorders and the microbiome).

Microbial genomics expert Tim Read, infectious diseases specialist Colleen Kraft and intestinal pathologist Andrew Neish have formed an Emory microbiome interest group with a listserv and seminars.

Microbiome symposium sponsors: ACTSI, Hercules Exposome Center, Emory University School of Medicine, Omega Biotek, CFDE, Ubiome. Read more

Posted on June 30, 2015 by Quinn Eastman in Immunology, Neuro Leave a comment

Tangled up with tau

Pathologist Keqiang Ye and his colleagues have identified a new potential drug target in Alzheimer’s disease. It’s called SRPK2 (serine-arginine protein kinase 2).

Keqiang Ye, PhD

Depleting this enzyme from the brain using genetic engineering tools alleviates cognitive impairment in an animal model of Alzheimer’s. The result suggests that drugs Cheap Oakleys that target this enzyme could be valuable in the treatment of Alzheimer’s, although additional studies on human brain samples are necessary to fully confirm the findings, Ye says.

The results were published Tuesday in Journal of Neuroscience. The first author is postdoctoral fellow Yi Hong.

Hong and colleagues found that SRPK2 has elevated activity in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s. It acts on tau, one of the two major toxic clumpy proteins in Alzheimer’s. (beta-amyloid is outside the cell and forms plaques, tau is inside and forms tangles). Previous research on SRPK2 indicated that it had something to do with RNA splicing, so its “entanglement” with tau is a surprise.

Posted on November 29, 2012 by Quinn Eastman in Neuro Leave a comment

Dye me anticancer yellow

Over the last few years, pathologist Keqiang Ye and his colleagues have displayed an uncanny talent for finding potentially useful medicinal compounds. Recently another example of this talent appeared in Journal of Biological Chemistry.

Keqiang Ye, PhD

Postdoctoral fellow Qi Qi is first author on the paper. Collaborators include Jeffrey Olson, Liya Wang, Hui Mao, Haian Fu, Suresh Ramalingam and Shi-Yong Sun at Emory and Paul Mischel at UCLA.

Qi and Ye were looking for compounds that could inhibit the growth of an especially aggressive form of brain cancer, glioblastoma with deletion in the tumor suppressor gene PTEN. Tumors with this deletion do not respond to currently available targeted therapies.

The researchers found that acridine yellow G, a fluorescent dye used to stain microscope slides, can inhibit the growth of this tumor:

Oral administration of this compound evidently decreases the tumor volumes in both subcutaneous and intracranial models and elongates the life span of brain tumor inoculated nude mice. It also displays potent antitumor effect against human lung cancers. Moreover, it significantly decreases cell proliferation and enhances apoptosis in tumors…

Optimization of this compound by improving its potency through medicinal chemistry modification might warrant a novel anticancer drug for malignant human cancers.

Ye’s team observed that acridine yellow G appears not to be toxic in rodents. However, the acridine family of compounds tends to intercalate (insert itself) into DNA and can promote DNA damage, so more toxicology studies are needed. Other acridine family compounds such as quinacrine have been used to treat bacterial infections and as antiinflammatory agents, they note.

A paramecium stained with acridine orange, which shows anticancer activity for tumors containing PTEN mutations

Posted on February 23, 2012 by Quinn Eastman in Cancer Leave a comment

Drug discovery: shifting from brain growth factors to insulin

Earlier this year, the FDA put limitations on some anti-diabetic drugs because of their cardiovascular risks. The prevalence of diabetes in the United States continues to increase and is now above 8 percent of the population, so the need for effective therapies remains strong.

Keqiang Ye, PhD

Pathologist Keqiang Ye and colleagues have a paper in the Journal of Biological Chemistry describing their identification of a compound that mimics the action of insulin. This could be the starting point for developing new anti-diabetes drugs.

The new research is an extension of the Ye laboratory’s work on TrkA and TrkB, which are important for the response of neurons to growth factors. Ye and Sung-Wuk Jang, a remarkably productive postdoc who is now an assistant professor at Korea University, developed an assay that allowed them to screen drug libraries for compounds that directly activate TrkA and TrkB. This led them to find a family of growth-factor-mimicking compounds that could treat conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, depression and stroke.

Since TrkA/B and the insulin receptor are basically the same kind of molecule — receptor tyrosine kinases– and use some of the same cellular circuitry, Ye and Jang’s assay could also be used with the insulin receptor. Kunyan He and Chi-Bun Chan are the first two authors on the new paper. They report that the compound DDN can make cells more sensitive to insulin and improve their ability to take up glucose. They show that DDN (5,8-diacetyloxy-2,3-dichloro-1,4- naphthoquinone) can lower blood sugar, both in standard laboratory mice and in obese mice that serve as a model for type II diabetes.

Ye reports that he and his colleagues are working with medicinal chemists to identify related compounds that may have improved efficacy and potency.

“I hope in the near future we may have something that could replace insulin for treating diabetes orally,” he says.

Posted on October 7, 2011 by Quinn Eastman in Uncategorized Leave a comment

Genetic alteration opens door to targeted treatment of rare tumor

A cross section of an epithelioid hemangioendothelioma

Emory pathologist Sharon Weiss, MD, was the first to describe an extraordinarily rare tumor known as an epithelioid hemangioendothelioma (EHE). Thirty years later, researchers have identified a genetic alteration linked to this odd vascular tumor.

It’s hoped this newfound information will lead to a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying the development of this tumor and hence development of a targeted treatment. None yet is available. However, these findings already have been used to develop a new diagnostic test for this blood vessel disease.

The research, published in a recent issue of Science Translational Medicine, was done in collaboration with Cleveland Clinic’s Taussig Cancer Institute and led by Brian Rubin, MD, PhD, of Cleveland Clinic’s Pathology and Laboratory Medicine Institute and Lerner Research Institute.

The genetic alteration formerly in question involves a translocation between chromosomes 1 and 3, where chromosomes 1 and 3 exchange DNA fragments that are transposed onto opposite chromosomes. The result: the swapped DNA encodes a unique, fused gene that contains components from each chromosome. Because genes are translated into proteins, the result of this unique gene is a correspondingly unique protein, one thought to cause cancer.

Epithelioid hemangioendotheliomas comprise less than one percent of all cancers. Roughly 100 new cases are diagnosed in the United State each year. EHE are eccentric in their epidemiology, structure and aggressiveness. Slow to metastasize, they tend to occur in both young men and women when soft tissue is involved but occur mostly in women when the liver and lungs are affected.

However, it’s their peculiar structure that has so far made targeted treatment problematic, especially in the liver and lungs. “Instead of being one mass as you might expect with liver cancer, the patient with EHE often presents with little nodules throughout the liver,” says Weiss.

“The reason this occurs is that the growth starts in the liver’s portal vein, grows along its length, and then tracks out through the vessels. The growths blister out from the vessel creating these little nodules. Epithelioid hemangioendothelioma don’t possess the classic features of vascular tumors. In fact, EHE may have so many sites of involvement that the cancer can’t be cured, short of transplantation.”

Using EHE tissue samples gleaned from Weiss’s vast library, Rubin developed a genetic probe to detect the distinct chromosomal translocations in the tumor. The probe now serves as a powerful diagnostic tool of EHE and opens the door to understanding these tumors’ mechanisms.

“Once you understand the mechanism behind it, you can start trying to target those pathways in a therapeutic way,” says Weiss.

Posted on September 29, 2011 by admin in Cancer 1 Comment

Questions only a network of pathologists can answer

When a patient is fighting a brain tumor, pathologists usually obtain a tiny bit of the tumor, either through a biopsy or after surgery, and prepare a microscope slide. Looking at the slide, they can sometimes (but not always) tell what type of tumor it is. That allows them to have an answer, however tentative, for that critical question from the patient: “How long have do I have?” as well as give guidance on what kind of treatment will be best.

Dan Brat, a pathologist specializing in brain tumors at Emory Winship Cancer Institute, gave a presentation this week explaining how he has been asking more complicated questions, ones only a network of pathologists armed with sophisticated computers can answer:

  • What genes tend to be turned on or off in the various types of brain tumors?
  • What does the pattern look like when a tumor is running out of oxygen?
  • What if we get a “robot pathologist” to look at hundreds of thousands of brain tumor slides?
Under the microscope, the shapes of cell nuclei in brain tumors look different depending on the type of tumor.

Under the microscope, the shapes of cell nuclei in brain tumors look different depending on the type of tumor.

Brat was speaking at a caBIG (cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid) conference, taking place at the Emory Conference Center this week. caBIG is a computer network sponsored by the National Cancer Institute that allows doctors to share experimental data on cancers. Brat explained that low-grade brain tumors come in two varieties: oligodendrogliomas and astrocytomas. Under the microscope, cell nuclei in the first tend to look round and smooth, but the second look elongated and rough. Kind of like the differences between an orange and a potato, he said.  He and colleague Jun Kong designed a computer program that could tell one from the other. They had the program look through almost 400,000 slides, using resources compiled through caBIG (Rembrandt and Cancer Genome Atlas databases). Sifting through the data, they could find that certain genes are turned on in each kind of tumor.

Imagine a "robot pathologist" that can sift through thousands of images from brain tumor samples.

Imagine a "robot pathologist" that can sift through thousands of images from brain tumor samples.
Daniel Brat, MD, PhD, principal investigator for the In Silico Brain Tumor Research Center

Daniel Brat, MD, PhD, principal investigator for the In Silico Brain Tumor Research Center

Eventually, this kind of information could help a patient with a brain tumor get good responses to those “How long?” and “How am I going to get through this?” questions.

Joel Saltz, who leads Emory’s Center for Comprehensive Informatics, has been a central figure in developing tools for centers such as Emory’s In Silico Brain Tumor Research Center. In September 2009, Emory was selected to host one of five “In Silico Research Centers of Excellence” by the National Cancer Institute.

Posted on December 10, 2009 by Quinn Eastman in Cancer Leave a comment