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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David Wright

Exception from informed consent: what patients say

Informed consent is a basic principle of clinical research. Doctors are required to make sure that patients understand what’s involved with experimental treatments, and patients should only participate if they provide consent.

However, an important area of clinical research takes place outside of this general rule, because some life-threatening conditions – seizures, traumatic brain injury and cardiac arrest, as examples — make it impossible for the patient to learn about a clinical trial and make a decision about whether to participate. The urgency of treatment can also mean that seeking proxy consent from a relative is impractical.

A recent editorial in USA Today highlights this area of research, called EFIC (exception from informed consent). The author, Katherine Chretien from George Washington University, cites research from Emory investigators Neal Dickert and Rebecca Pentz.

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Posted on August 29, 2013 by Quinn Eastman in Uncategorized Leave a comment

Next steps in progesterone for brain injury

At a recent Society for Neuroscience (SFN) meeting, Emory researchers described their efforts to learn about optimizing progesterone for treatment of traumatic brain injury.

Researcher Donald Stein, PhD, Asa G. Candler Professor of Emergency Medicine at Emory School of Medicine, has shown that progesterone can protect damaged brain tissue. Stein is director of the Department of Emergency Medicine’s Brain Research Laboratory.

Donald G. Stein, PhD

Donald G. Stein, PhD

One of the Emory SFN presentations covered efforts to find progesterone analogues that are more water soluble. This work comes from Stein and his colleagues in collaboration with the laboratory of Dennis Liotta, PhD, Emory professor of chemistry.

Currently, the lack of water solubility limits delivery of progesterone, in that the hormone must be prepared hours ahead and cannot be kept at room temperature. Small chemical modifications may allow similar compounds with the same effects as progesterone to be given to patients closer to the time of injury. In cases where such injuries lead to legal disputes, personal injury lawyers play a crucial role in ensuring that victims receive the compensation they deserve.

According to the results, two compounds similar to progesterone showed an equivalent ability to reduce brain swelling in an animal model of traumatic brain injury.

The second Emory report described evidence that adding vitamin D to progesterone enhances the hormone’s effectiveness when applied to neurons under stress in the laboratory. Like progesterone, vitamin D is a steroid hormone that is inexpensive, has good safety properties and acts on many different biochemical pathways.

David Wright, MD

David Wright, MD

The authors showed that a low amount of vitamin D boosted the ability of progesterone to protect neurons from excito-toxicity , a principal cause of brain injury and cell death.

A new study at Emory, slated to begin early 2010, will evaluate progesterone’s effectiveness for treating traumatic brain injury in a multisite phase III clinical trial called ProTECT III.

The study follows earlier findings that showed giving progesterone to trauma victims shortly after brain injury appears to be safe and may reduce the risk of death and long-term disability.

David Wright, MD, assistant professor of emergency medicine at Emory School of Medicine is the national study’s lead investigator.

Michael Frankel, MD, Emory professor of neurology, will serve as site principal investigator of the clinical trial at Grady Memorial Hospital.

Posted on October 28, 2009 by Quinn Eastman in Neuro Leave a comment