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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hydrogels

Regenerative Engineering & Medicine highlights

Last week on Friday, Lab Land attended the annual Regenerative Engineering & Medicine center get-together to hear about progress in this exciting area.

During his talk, Tony Kim of Georgia Tech mentioned a topic that Rose Eveleth recently explored in The Atlantic: why aren’t doctors using amazing “nanorobots” yet? Or as Kim put it, citing a recent review, “So many papers and so few drugs.”

[A summary: scaling up is difficult, testing pharmacokinetics, toxicity and efficacy is difficult, and so is satisfying the FDA.]

The talks Friday emerged from REM seed grants; many paired an Emory medical researcher with a Georgia Tech biomedical engineer. All of these projects take on challenges in delivering regenerative therapies: getting cells or engineered particles to the right place in the body.

For example, cardiologist W. Robert Taylor discussed the hurdles his team had encountered in scaling up his cells-in-capsules therapies for cardiovascular diseases to pigs, in collaboration with Luke Brewster. The pre-pig phase of this research is discussed in more detail here and here. Read more

Posted on August 14, 2015 by Quinn Eastman in Heart, Neuro Leave a comment

Making cardiac progenitor cells feel at home

One lab uses goopy alginate, another uses peptides that self-assemble into hydrogels. The objective is the same: protecting cells that are injected into the heart and making them feel like they’re at home.

Around the world, thousands of heart disease patients have been treated in clinical studies with some kind of cell-based therapy aimed at regenerating the heart muscle or at least promoting its healing. This approach is widely considered promising, but its effectiveness is limited in that most of the cells don’t stay in the heart or die soon after being introduced. [UPDATE: Nice overview of cardiac cell therapy controversy in July 18 Science]

Biomedical engineer Mike Davis and his colleagues recently published a paper in Biomaterials describing hydrogels that can encourage cardiac progenitor cells injected into the heart to stay in place. The first author is former graduate student Archana Boopathy, who recently started her postdoctoral work at MIT. Davis has been working with these self-assembling peptides for some time: see this 2005 Circulation paper he published during his own postdoctoral work with Richard Lee at Harvard.DavisDiagram

How do these hydrogels keep cells from washing away? We don’t have to go much beyond the name: think Jello. Researchers design snippets of proteins (peptides) that, like Jello*, form semisolid gels under the right conditions in solution. Helpfully, they also are customized with molecular tools for making cardiac progenitor cells happy. Read more

Posted on July 21, 2014 by Quinn Eastman in Heart 1 Comment