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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Immunology

Key to universal flu vaccine: embrace the unfamiliar

Vaccine researchers through the help of laboratory kitting services have developed a strategy aimed at generating broadly cross-reactive antibodies against the influenza virus: embrace the unfamiliar.

In recent years, researchers interested in a “universal flu vaccine” identified a region of the viral hemagglutinin protein called the stem or stalk, which doesn’t mutate and change as much as other regions and could be the basis for a vaccine that is protective against a variety of flu strains.

In an Emory Vaccine Center study, human volunteers immunized against the avian flu virus H5N1 readily developed antibodies against the stem region of the viral hemagglutinin protein. In contrast, those immunized with standard seasonal trivalent vaccines did not, instead developing most of their antibodies against the more variable head region. H5N1, regarded as a potential pandemic strain, is not currently circulating in the United States and the volunteers had not been exposed to it before.

The results were published Monday, August 25 in PNAS.

The key to having volunteers’ bodies produce antibodies against the stem region seemed to be their immune systems’ unfamiliarity with the H5N1 type of virus, says lead author Ali Ellebedy, PhD, postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Rafi Ahmed, PhD, director of Emory Vaccine Center and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar.

Note: for a counterpoint, check out this 2013 Science Translational Medicine paper on how vaccination that induces anti-stem antibodies contributes to enhanced respiratory disease in pigs.

Read more

Posted on August 27, 2014 by Quinn Eastman in Immunology Leave a comment

Catching up on Emory transplant advances

While preparing to discuss Ebola virology with Emory infectious disease specialist Aneesh Mehta next week, we noticed two recent research papers on which he is a co-author. Both have to do with organ transplantation, since Mehta is Assistant Director of Transplant Infectious Diseases.

Fecal microbiota transplantation for refractory Clostridium difficile colitis in solid organ transplant recipients

Fecal transplant is gaining ground as a remedy for C. difficile-driven diarrheal infections, which can appear in patients whose normal intestinal bacteria are wiped out by antibiotics. Fecal transplant has not been widely studied in organ transplant recipients, who must take drugs to keep their immune systems from rejecting the transplanted organ, because of concerns about infectious disease complications. This paper describes two patients, one a lung transplant recipient and one a kidney transplant recipient, who received fecal transplants to resolve their C. difficile diarrhea without complications. The lead authors are infectious disease specialists Rachel Friedman-Moraco and Colleen Kraft. Kraft has been a pioneer in this area of research.

Renal transplantation using belatacept without maintenance steroids or calcineurin inhibitors

Medical school dean Chris Larsen and Emory Transplant Center executive director Tom Pearson (both co-authors) were key members on the team that developed belatacept, a FDA-approved drug since 2011. Belatacept was designed to get away from the cruel paradox where a kidney recipient, to prevent transplant rejection, has to take calcineurin inhibitor drugs that slowly poison the kidney and cardiovascular health. Belatacept inhibits the immune response by a different mechanism. Yet transplant specialists have generally been cautious in moving toward a regimen that relies on it.

As reported in this paper, Emory transplant doctors took off the training wheels, aiming to get to the point where kidney transplant recipients are taking a once-a-month infusion of belatacept only. With some patients, it was possible to reach that goal, but not all. In fact, as the authors describe, some patients chose not to try to wean themselves off the other drugs, and doctors advised against the attempt for a handful. This clinical trial was also notable because some transplant recipients received immune-educational cells from their organ donors in the form of bone marrow.

The lead author, former Emory Transplant Center scientific director Allan Kirk, moved to Duke this spring.

Posted on August 22, 2014 by Quinn Eastman in Immunology Leave a comment

Contraception and HIV risk

Does hormonal contraception increase the risk for a woman to acquire HIV from an infected partner?

This topic, with implications for public health in countries where HIV risk is high, has been contentious. Some previous studies had found the answer to be yes, for methods involving injectable progesterone such as Depo-Provera. This led the World Health Organization in 2012 to advise women using progesterone-only injections to use condoms to prevent HIV infection.

At the recent AIDS 2014 meeting in Australia, Emory epidemiologist Kristin Wall presented data from public health programs in Zambia. This is another study emerging from the Zambia-Emory HIV Research Project directed by Susan Allen.

Wall’s presentation is available here.

Studying 1393 heterosexual couples with a HIV-positive male partner over 17 years, Wall and her colleagues found no significant difference in incidence rate per 100 couple years between hormonal and non-hormonal forms of contraception. Read more

Posted on August 6, 2014 by Quinn Eastman in Immunology Leave a comment

Fighting HIV, biomedical and behavioral hand in hand

In the HIV/AIDS arena, the idea of “treatment as prevention” has been gaining strength. Multiple studies have shown that treatment with anti-retroviral drugs can dramatically reduce the likelihood that someone infected with HIV will be able to pass the virus to someone else.

However, a recent strategy document for HIV/AIDS prevention developed by a International Antiviral Society–USA panel, co-led by Rollins Global Health chair Carlos Del Rio, puts biomedical interventions hand in hand with psychosocial measures such as couples counseling and treatment for drug dependence.

Why? Because people everywhere can have trouble sticking to antiretroviral treatment, even if drugs are available. And couples counseling by itself is valuable.

A powerful example of how this plays out, and of the importance of couples counseling to the effectiveness of antiretroviral drugs in prevention, comes from a recent presentation from Emory epidemiologist Kristin Wall at the AIDS 2014 meeting in Australia. The website NAM Aidsmap had a helpful write-up of her presentation, which is available here. Thanks to co-author Susan Allen for alerting us to this.

CVCT (couples voluntary counseling and treatment) greatly enhanced the preventive effect of antiretroviral treatment, when compared to treatment without counselling, Wall’s analysis of a large cohort of couples in Zambia showed. 

Update: Allen points out that couples counseling by itself was effective in helping people avoid HIV, with a 75 percent reduction in incidence for couples where the HIV+ partner was not receiving antiviral therapy or with HIV negative couples.  Read more

Posted on July 30, 2014 by Quinn Eastman in Immunology 2 Comments

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

Cancer immunotherapy, meet chimera

697px-Chimera_d'arezzo,_fi,_03

In Greek mythology, the chimera was a monstrous fire-breathing creature composed of the parts of three animals: a lion, a snake and a goat.

Adoptive cell transfer is advancing as a cancer immunotherapy technique. It involves removing some of a patient’s immune cells, culturing them in the laboratory, and then infusing the cells back into the patient. The idea is to enhance the ability of the immune cells to attack the tumors far beyond what the immune system was able of doing on its own.

Two promising examples are the National Cancer Institute’s approach of treating advanced melanoma with IL-2-stimulated immune cells, and several investigators’ approach of genetically engineering T cells to attack leukemias or lymphomas.

Jacques Galipeau and colleagues at Winship Cancer Institute have developed a chimeric molecule for stimulating immune cells, which appears to have unique powers beyond simply the sum of its two parts. The molecule is called GIFT4, a fusion of the immune signaling molecules GM-CSF (often used in cancer treatment) and IL-4.

Read more

Posted on June 20, 2014 by Quinn Eastman in Cancer, Immunology Leave a comment

Freezing stem cells disrupts their function

What applies to meat, vegetables and fish may also apply to cells for use in cell therapy: frozen often isn’t quite as good.

Ian Copland and colleagues from Emory’s Personalized Immunotherapy Center have a paper this week in Stem Cells Reports discussing how freezing and thawing stem cells messes them up. Specifically, it disrupts their actin cytoskeletons and impairs their ability to find their niches in the body. Culturing the cells for 48 hours after thawing does seem to correct the problem, though.

The findings have some straightforward implications for researchers planning to test cell therapies in clinical applications. The authors conclude:

Until such time as a cryopreservation and thawing procedure can yield a viable and fully functional MSC product immediately after thawing, our data support the idea of using live MSCs rather than post-thaw cryo MSCs for clinical evaluation of MSCs as an immunosuppressive agent.

Notably, the Emory Personalized Immunotherapy Center has built a process designed around offering never-frozen autologous (that is, the patient’s own) mesenchymal stem cells, as therapies for autoimmune disorders such as Crohn’s disease.

Posted on June 6, 2014 by Quinn Eastman in Immunology Leave a comment

Oink! — Glycan receptors for flu viruses

Pigs are natural hosts for influenza viruses that can infect humans, in particular the 2009 and, going way back, 1918 H1N1 flu strains. So to understand how influenza infections spread in the body, biochemists and virologists look at pigs.

Biochemistry chair Rick Cummings’ group has a paper in PNAS this week examining the carbohydrates or glycans on the surfaces of pig lung cells, using their “shotgun glycomics” library approach. MMG graduate student Lauren Byrd-Leotis is the first author.Piglung

“The results illustrate the repertoire of specific, endogenous N-glycans of pig lung glycoproteins for virus recognition and offer a new direction for studying endogenous glycan functions in viral pathogenesis,” the team reports.

Posted on May 28, 2014 by Quinn Eastman in Immunology Leave a comment

Whole exome sequencing in IBD

Last year, pediatric gastroenterologist Subra Kugathasan gave an “old fashioned” grand rounds talk at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta’s Egleston hospital, describing a family’s struggle with a multifaceted problem of autoimmunity.

Subra Kugathasan, MD

Now the Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition paper, on how the genetic alteration underlying the family’s struggles was identified, is published. Kugathasan reports that the young man at the center of the paper is scheduled for allogeneic bone marrow transplant in the United States (but not in Atlanta) in the next couple months.

The list of troubles the members of the family had to deal with is long: gastrointestinal issues and food allergies, skin irritation, bacterial + yeast infections, and arthritis. The mother and her brother were affected to some degree, as well as all three of the kids (see tree diagram). The youngest brother is the “proband”, a geneticist’s term for starting point.

As determined by whole exome sequencing, the gene responsible is FOXP3, which controls the development of regulatory T cells. These are cells that restrain the rest of the immune system; if they aren’t functioning correctly, the immune system is at war with the rest of the body, like in this family.

The genetic variant identified was new — that’s why whole exome sequencing was necessary to find it. The authors conclude:

Supporting the utility of WES [whole exome sequencing] in familial clusters of atypical IBD [inflammatory bowel disease], this approach led to a definitive diagnosis in this case, resulting in a justifiable treatment strategy of allogeneic bone marrow transplantation, the treatment of choice for IPEX [Immune dysregulation, polyendocrinopathy, enteropathy, X-linked syndrome].

Bone marrow transplant is a big deal; doctors are essentially wiping out the immune system then bringing it back, with several associated risks. So the decision to go ahead is not taken lightly. In general, whether bone marrow transplant — either autologous (patient donates back to self) or allogeneic (the donor is someone else) — is appropriate as a treatment for inflammatory bowel disease is still being investigated. Here, since a genetic origin is clear and there are autoimmune effects beyond the digestive system, it becomes the treatment of choice.

Posted on May 16, 2014 by Quinn Eastman in Immunology Leave a comment

Two angles on cell death

One can take two very different angles when approaching Bill Kaiser’s and Ed Mocarski’s work on RIP kinases and the mechanisms of cell death. These are: the evolutionary where-does-apoptosis-come-from angle, and the anti-inflammatory drug discovery angle.

A pair of papers published this week, one in PNAS and one in Journal of Immunology, cover both of these angles. (Also, back to back papers in Cell this week, originating from Australia and Tennessee, touch on the same topic.)

First, the evolutionary angle.

Cellular suicide can be a “scorched earth” defense mechanism against viruses. Kaiser and Mocarski have been amassing evidence that some forms of cellular suicide arose as a result of an arms race of competition with viruses. The PNAS paper is part of this line of evidence. It shows that the cell-death circuits controlled by three different genes (RIP1, RIP3 and caspase 8) apparently can be lifted cleanly out of an animal. Mice lacking all three genes not only can be born, but have well-functioning immune systems.

Apoptosis is thought to be a form of cellular suicide important for the development of all multicellular organisms. That’s why, to cell and developmental biologists, it seemed rather shocking that researchers can mutate a group of genes that drive apoptosis and other forms of cellular suicide and have adult animals emerge.

Next, the drug discovery angle.

The J. Immunol paper makes that angle clear enough. Most of the authors on this paper are from GlaxoSmithKline’s “Pattern Recognition Receptor Discovery Performance Unit, Immuno-Inflammation Therapeutic Area.” Here, they show that a mutation in RIP1 inactivating the kinase enzyme protects mice against severe skin and multiorgan inflammation. They conclude their abstract with: “Together, these data suggest that RIP1 kinase represents an attractive therapeutic target for TNF-driven inflammatory diseases.”

Note: TNF-driven inflammatory diseases include rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel diseases and psoriasis, representing a multibillion dollar market.

 

Posted on May 13, 2014 by Quinn Eastman in Immunology Leave a comment
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