Author Interviews, Brigham & Women's - Harvard, Heart Disease, Nature / 04.02.2021

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr. Hugo Aerts, PhD Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Associate Professor, Brigham and Women's Hospital Harvard Medical School Director, Program for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Brigham And Women's Hospital  MedicalResearch.com: Deep convolutional neural networks to predict cardiovascular risk from computed tomography  Response: Cardiovascular disease is the most common preventable cause of death in Europe and the United States. Effective lifestyle and pharmacological prevention is available, but identifying those who would benefit most remains an ongoing challenge. Hence, efforts are needed to further improve cardiovascular risk prediction and stratification on an individual basis. One of the strongest known predictors for adverse cardiovascular events is coronary artery calcification, which can be quantified on computed tomography (CT). The CT coronary calcium score is a measure of the burden of coronary atherosclerosis and is one of the most widely accepted measures of cardiovascular risk. Recent strides in artificial intelligence, deep learning in particular, have shown its viability in several medical applications such as medical diagnostic and imaging, risk management, or virtual assistants. A major advantage is that deep learning can automate complex assessments that previously could only be done by radiologists, but now is feasible at scale with a higher speed and lower cost. This makes deep learning a promising technology for automating cardiovascular event prediction from imaging. However, before clinical introduction can be considered, generalizability of these systems needs to be demonstrated as they need to be able to predict cardiovascular events of asymptomatic and symptomatic individuals across multiple clinical scenarios, and work robustly on data from multiple institutions. (more…)
Author Interviews, Microbiome, Nature, Weight Research / 21.12.2020

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Harriët Schellekens MSc PhD Lecturer Department of Anatomy & Neuroscience, and APC Microbiome Ireland SFI Research Centre University College Cork, Cork, IRELAND.  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: There has been an increased emphasis on gut microbiota-targeted therapeutics for the amelioration of obesity. Recent studies have identified several probiotic strains with different anti-obesity effects, including members of the genus Bifidobacterium, but the exact mechanisms of action are still lacking. Moreover, positive effects in animal studies often do not translate in human studies. The APC Microbiome Ireland has set up a “culture-to-product” platform, a well catalogued and quality controlled collection of bacteria with potential biofunctional activities. In my laboratory, I have developed a state-of the art “bug-to-drug” screening approach, using high-throughput biochemical and cellular assays, to fully characterize bacteria and identify the most promising bacterial strains with specific desirable probiotic and functional properties. This careful in vitro screening of APC’s strains (or customer strains) is designed to identify the most potent candidates that can impact on host physiology and overall gut-brain axis function, e.g. by producing microbial metabolites or neuroactives, altering gut-barrier function, reducing inflammation, or modifying G-protein coupled receptors. This comprehensive screening approach facilitates the precise selection and prediction of the best strains that are likely to yield a specific positive health effects in subsequent animal and human studies, based on their in vitro probiotic and functional properties.  (more…)
Author Interviews, COVID -19 Coronavirus, CT Scanning, Johns Hopkins, Nature / 12.12.2020

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Nilanjan Chatterjee, PhD Bloomberg Distinguished Professor Departments of Biostatistics and Epidemiology Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Calculation of risks or severe COVID-19 disease and mortality for individuals in the general population can help to prioritize prevention efforts, such as early vaccination. We developed a model to estimate risks for COVID-19 mortality for currently uninflected individuals based on sociodemographic factors, pre-existing conditions and local pandemic intensity.  The model captures factors associated with both risk of infection and complications after infection. The model was developed using information from a large UK based cohort study called OpenSAFELY, and was adapted to the US population based on information on mortality rate associated with age and race/ethnicity available through CDC.  The model also utilizes information on state level projected death rates from pandemic forecasting models.  (more…)
Author Interviews, Environmental Risks, Nature, Pediatrics / 23.10.2020

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Prof. John Boland AMBER The SFI Research Centre for Advanced Materials and BioEngineering Research, CRANN, and Trinity’s School of Chemistry Prof. Liwen Xiao at TrinityHaus and Trinity’s School of Engineering Trinity College Dublin baby-bottle-infant-plasticsMedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: There is growing evidence to suggest that micro and nano plastics are released into our food and water sources through the chemical and physical degradation of larger plastic items. Some studies have demonstrated the potential transfer of micro and nano plastics from oceans to humans via the food chain but little is known about the direct release of microplastics (MPs) from plastic products through everyday use – and this is what we wanted to investigate.  Polypropylene (PP) is one of the most commonly produced plastics in the world for food preparation and storage. It is used to make everyday items such as lunch boxes, kettles and infant-feeding bottles (IFBs). Despite its widespread use the capacity of PP to release microplastics was not appreciated until now. We analysed the potential for release of MPs from polypropylene infant-feeding bottles (PP-IFBs) during formula preparation by following international guidelines. We also estimated the exposure of 12-month-old infants to MPs in 48 countries and regions.  (more…)
Author Interviews, Depression, Mental Health Research, Nature, PTSD / 21.10.2020

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Amit Etkin, MD, PhD Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, Stanford Universitu Stanford, CA    MedicalResearch.com: What is the mission of Cohen Veterans Bioscience - CVB?  Cohen Veterans Bioscience Response: Cohen Veterans Bioscience (CVB) is a non-profit 501(c)(3) research biotech dedicated to fast-tracking the development of diagnostic tests and personalized therapeutics for the millions of Veterans and civilians who suffer the devastating effects of trauma-related and other brain disorders. To learn about CVB’s research efforts visit www.cohenveteransbioscience.org.   MedicalResearch.com: How can patients with PTSD or MDD benefit from this information? Response: With the discovery of this new brain imaging biomarker, patients who suffer from PTSD or MDD may be guided towards the most effective treatment without waiting months and months to find a treatment that may work for them.   MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: This study, which was supported with a grant from Cohen Veterans Bioscience, grants from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH and other supporters, derives from our work over the past few years which has pointed to the critical importance of understanding how patients with a variety of psychiatric disorders differ biologically. The shortcomings of our current diagnostic system have become very clear over the past 1-2 decades, but the availability of tools for transcending these limitations on the back of objective biological tests has not kept pace with the need for those tools. In prior work, we have used a variety of methods, including different types of brain imaging, to identify brain signals that underpin key biological differences within and across traditional psychiatric diagnoses. We have also developed specialized AI tools for decoding complex patterns of brain activity in order to understand and quantify biological heterogeneity in individual patients. These developments have then, in turn, converged with the completion of a number of large brain imaging-coupled clinical trials, which have provided a scale of these types of data not previously available in the field. (more…)
Author Interviews, Genetic Research, Nature, NYU / 17.08.2020

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Professor Aneel K Aggarwal, PhD Pharmacological Sciences and Oncological Sciences Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: DNA polymerase ζ  (Pol ζ) is the crucial enzyme that allows cells to cope with DNA damage resulting from exposure to environmental and industrial carcinogens and to other daily genotoxic stresses. At the same time, Pol ζ has emerged as an important target for discovery of therapeutics in the treatment of chemotherapy-resistant cancers.  MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings?   Response: We have succeeded in resolving the 3-D atomic structure of the complete Pol ζ enzyme using cryo-electron microscopy. (more…)
Author Interviews, Cancer Research, Nature, Technology / 06.08.2020

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Moritz Gerstung PhD Group Leader: Computational cancer biology EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: We have learned a lot in the last ten years about the molecular nature about various cancers thanks to the resources created by TCGA, ICGC and many other initiatives. Similarly, digital pathology has progressed hugely due to new AI algorithms. Yet it hasn’t been explored deeply how a cancer’s genetic makeup and its histopathological appearance are related. Here computers can be very helpful as they can process large amounts of digital microscopy slide images and test whether there are any recurrent histopathological patterns in relation to hundreds or thousands of genetic and other molecular abnormalities.  (more…)
Author Interviews, Genetic Research, Nature, Technology / 15.07.2020

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr.Altuna Akalin PhD Head of Bioinformatics and Omics Data Science Platform Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology (BIMSB) Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) Berlin, Germany  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Where does the word Janggu come from?  Response: Deep learning applications on genomic datasets used to be a cumbersome process where researchers spend a lot of time on preparing and formatting data before they even can run deep learning models. In addition, the evaluation of deep learning models and the choice of deep learning framework were also not straightforward. To streamline these processes, we developed Janggu. With this framework, we are aiming to relieve some of that technical burden and make deep learning accessible to as many people as possible. Janggu is named after a traditional Korean drum shaped like an hourglass turned on its side. The two large sections of the hourglass represent the areas Janggu is focused: pre-processing of genomics data, results visualization and model evaluation. The narrow connector in the middle represents a placeholder for any type of deep learning model researchers wish to use.  (more…)
Author Interviews, Dermatology, Melanoma, Nature, Technology / 23.06.2020

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Professor Harald Kittler, MD ViDIR Group, Department of Dermatology Medical University of Vienna Vienna, Austria MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?  What types of skin cancers were assessed? (melanoma, SCC, Merkel etc). Response: Some researchers believe that AI will make human intelligence dispensable. It is, however, still a matter of debate how exactly AI will influence diagnostic medicine in the future. The current narrative is focused on a competition between human and artificial intelligence. We sought to shift the direction of this narrative more towards human/AI collaboration. To this end we studied the use-case of skin cancer diagnosis including the most common types of skin cancer such as melanoma, basal cell- and squamous cell carcinoma. The initial idea was to explore the effects of varied representations of AI support across different levels of clinical expertise and to address the question of how humans and machines work together as a team. (more…)
Author Interviews, Cancer Research, Melanoma, Nature / 21.05.2020

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr. Kelly Brooks PhD Research Officer QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute     MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: There are approximately 175 new cases a year for melanomas inside the eye called uveal melanomas. These cancers spread to other sites of the body in about half of patients. Uveal melanomas are very different to skin melanomas and so far no effective treatment have been approved to treat uveal melanoma once it has spread. We sequenced uveal melanoma tumours from over 100 different patients to look at what mutations are responsible for tumour growth and development.  (more…)
Author Interviews, Cancer Research, Lancet, Nature / 19.05.2020

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Matthew Galsky, MD Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai New York, NY MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Standard first-line treatment for metastatic urothelial (bladder) cancer has been platinum-based chemotherapy for decades. In 2016, atezolizumab, an immunotherapy that inhibits PD-L1, received accelerated approval by the FDA for the treatment of metastatic urothelial cancer for patients progressing despite prior platinum-based chemotherapy and this was followed by approvals for 4 additional PD-1 or PD-L1 inhibitors in this setting over the next couple years. With this first new drug class approved, representing the first new drugs approved for metastatic urothelial cancer for decades, logical question arose (a) should we combine these drugs with platinum-based chemotherapy in the first-line metastatic treatment setting and (b) is there a role to replace first-line chemotherapy with atezolizumab monotherapy. The IMvigor 130 trial was designed to address these questions. The trial enrolled 1213 patients who were randomized to treatment with (a) atezolizumab plus platinum-based chemotherapy, (b) placebo + platinum-based chemotherapy, or (c) atezolizumab monotherapy. The trial employed a hierarchical analysis plan such that comparisons between arms for certain endpoints could only be formally tested if other the preceding comparisons demonstrated a significant improvement.  (more…)
Author Interviews, Brigham & Women's - Harvard, Gender Differences, Genetic Research, Nature / 13.05.2020

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Nolan Kamitaki PhD Harvard Medical School MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Previous work from our lab found that the strongest common genetic association to schizophrenia is driven in part by copy number variation of the C4 genes.  Given that lupus and Sjogren's syndrome, two autoimmune disorders, have association patterns that span the same region of the human genome, we wondered if part of the signal for these diseases may also arise from variation of C4 given that both have hypocomplementemia as a characterizing trait.   The other main finding is that these associations appear to be sex-biased, where the protection from each additional copy of the C4 gene was greater in men than in women.  When we went back to the data used in the previous study from our lab association C4 variation to schizophrenia, we found that the effect was stronger in men there as well.  Although the expression of C4 at the RNA level does not appear to differ between men and women, we saw that men had more C4 protein in both cerebrospinal fluid and blood plasma, suggesting that this may explain the greater genetic association in men. (more…)
Author Interviews, Brigham & Women's - Harvard, Nature, Weight Research / 05.05.2020

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Ronald Kahn, MD Chief Academic Officer, Joslin Diabetes Center Mary K. Iacocca Professor of Medicine Harvard Medical School MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Adipose tissue is a heterogeneous organ and composed of several cell types, including mature adipocytes, preadipocytes, stem cells, endothelial cells, and various blood cells. Different adipose depots have distinct physiological functions associated with their anatomical location and cell composition. For example, accumulation of intra-abdominal (visceral) white adipose tissue is associated with insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome, whereas accumulation of subcutaneous adipose tissue is not metabolically detrimental and may be even associated with increased insulin sensitivity. Determining the mechanisms for these phenotypic differences could lead to development of novel therapies for diabetes, obesity, and their associated morbidities. A central challenging question in research of metabolic disease is whether disease risk for diabetes and metabolic syndrome is driven by a subset of fat cells that may interact with environmental stresses in disease pathogenesis in a way different from other fat cells. Indeed, previous studies from the Kahn lab have shown different fat cells in a single depot from the mouse may exhibit developmental heterogeneity. In this new study, we attempted to address this question for human white fat using a synergistic application of several methodologies: 1) single cell transcriptional profiling of human white fat during differentiation, 2) analysis of individual clones of white fat cells taken from humans at surgery, 3) novel computer based network analysis and 4) integration of the gene signatures across experimental models. Single-cell RNA sequencing is an ideal technique to profile gene expression of heterogeneous cell populations obtained from a single tissue, including fat tissue. (more…)
Author Interviews, Genetic Research, Nature, Prostate Cancer, Vanderbilt / 24.03.2020

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Jeffrey R. Smith, MD PhD Department of Medicine, Division of Genetic Medicine Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, and Vanderbilt Genetics Institute Vanderbilt University Medical Center Medical Research Service Tennessee Valley Healthcare System, Veterans Administration Nashville, TN MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?   Response: Roughly 20% of men with prostate cancer have a family history of the disease, and 5% meet criteria for hereditary prostate cancer. Although prostate cancer has the greatest heritability of all common cancers (twice that of breast cancer), extensive heterogeneity of its inherited causes has presented a considerable obstacle for traditional pedigree-based genetic investigative approaches. Inherited causes across, as well as within families are diverse. This study introduced a new familial case-control study design that uses extent of family history as a proxy for genetic burden. It compared a large number of men with prostate cancer, each from a separate family with a strong history of the disease, to screened men with no personal or family history. The study comprehensively deconstructs how the 8q24 chromosomal region impacts risk of hereditary prostate cancer, introducing several new analytical approaches. The locus had been known to alter risk of prostate, breast, colon, ovarian, and numerous additional cancers. (more…)
Asthma, Author Interviews, Genetic Research, Nature / 28.02.2020

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Zbigniew Zasłona PhD Luke A. J. O’Neill PhD Professor (Chair of Biochemistry) School of Biochemistry and Immunology Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Asthma is the most common disease in childhood and the most common respiratory condition in Ireland. It is a disease of environmental and genetic components. It is important to point out that although Ireland has very good air quality, asthma prevalence is very high (the second highest in Europe), and although asthma is not a single gene disease (such as cystic fibrosis) it is very important to study genetic variations in Irish population. Therefore in this study we put emphasis on the genetic component of asthma, rather than environmental factors, especially given that asthma heritability has been estimated as high as 60%. Prevention of asthma by reducing exposure to common risk factors, such as air pollution, will not stop the asthma epidemic in Ireland, as inferior air quality is not an issue. (more…)
Author Interviews, Cancer Research, Nature / 16.01.2020

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Augusto Villanueva Rodriguez, MD, PhD Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai New York, NY MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: There is limited understanding of the extent of molecular heterogeneity in liver cancer. This cancer is the second most lethal tumor and the fourth cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide. Most patients diagnosed at advanced stages have a dismal survival, as most of them will develop resistance to systemic therapies. One of the potential mechanisms for this relates to the presence of different tumor clones within the same tumor nodule. This heterogeneity has been barely studied in liver cancer and our study provides a comprehensive analysis of the extent and potential clinical implications of intra-tumoral heterogeneity (ITH) in liver cancer. (more…)
Author Interviews, Autism, Genetic Research, Nature, Pediatrics / 10.12.2019

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr. Stephen Scherer, PhD, FRSC Senior Scientist, Genetics & Genome Biology Director, The Centre for Applied Genomics SickKids Hospital Toronto MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: One of the most common questions we get from parents with a child with autism is, "what is the likelihood of having a second or third child with autism, and what is the chance others in our family will have kids with autism?". To help provide answers to these questions, we started the infant (or baby) siblings study ten years ago. Families having an older sibling with a diagnosis of autism were invited to enroll their next born for assessment and following to see if they also developed autism, and what the likelihood of that happening was. Biological samples like blood, and DNA from blood, were also collected and tested.  (more…)
Author Interviews, Nature / 22.11.2019

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr. Gary J. Nabel M.D., Ph.D. Chief Scientific Officer, Global Research and Development Sanofi MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: The power of T cell co-stimulation in the immune system became apparent to the immunology community from basic studies on T cell activation and T cell receptor function dating back to the 1980’s and 1990’s.  As a professor at the University of Michigan and investigator at its Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the 1990’s, I became aware of this pathway through collaborations with Carl June and Craig Thompson in the 1990s.  When we stimulated T cells by engaging CD3 (a T cell receptor activation signal e.g. signal 1) and CD28 (a survival signal e.g. signal 2), we found that the co-stimulatory effect led to exceptional T cell proliferation. After our Sanofi team developed the trispecific antibody technology, we realized that it might be possible to engage CD3 and CD28 while targeting T cells to tumors with a third arm, CD38, which is highly expressed on myelomas, all interactions mediated by this one protein.  (more…)
Author Interviews, Dermatology, Nature, Stanford / 18.10.2019

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Stephen J. Galli, MD Mary Hewitt Loveless, MD Professor Professor of Pathology and of Microbiology and Immunology Department of Pathology Stanford University School of Medicine Center for Clinical Sciences Research Stanford, CA and Nicolas Gaudenzio PhD Unité de Différenciation Epithéliale et Autoimmunité Rhumatoïde INSERM, Université de Toulouse Toulouse, France MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: We took a lead from existing clinical data showing that patients with moderate to severe atopic dermatitis, an increasingly common disorder producing skin pathology, also have elevated levels of neuropeptides in their blood, particularly one neuropeptide, named “substance P”, whose level is correlated with disease severity. These patients also have high levels of mast cell-specific proteases in the blood, indicating that mast cells, which are innate immune cells present in the skin, and which can be activated when exposed to substance P, might play an essential role in modulating inflammatory and allergic processes. Based on these observations, our teams (Galli Lab at Stanford University, USA and Gaudenzio Lab at Inserm Toulouse, France) decided to focus on the possible interactions between sensory neurons, which are a source of substance P, and mast cells. The results of this work have now been published in the journal Nature Immunology. (more…)
Author Interviews, Heart Disease, Nature, Nutrition / 13.08.2019

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: apple-flavenoidsNicola Bondonno PhD National Health and Medical Research Council Early Career Research Fellow School of Medical and Health Sciences Edith Cowan University Joondalup  Perth WA   MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: In an aging society, there could be a huge importance in appropriate evidence-based diets to reduce mortality risk. Therefore, our main question was ‘do diets high in flavonoids reduce the risk of all-cause and cause-specific mortality and is this relationship affected by lifestyle risk factors for early mortality’? In brief, this is the largest study of flavonoid intake and mortality outcomes to date. This population based cohort study was conducted in 56,048 men and women of the Danish Diet, Cancer, and Health Cohort, followed for 23 years, with estimated intakes of 219 individual flavonoid compounds. The results provide a clarity not seen in previous smaller, often underpowered studies.  (more…)
Author Interviews, Brain Injury, Exercise - Fitness, Nature, Science / 11.08.2019

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Adnan Hirad, PhD MD Candidate, Medical Scientist Training Program University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Concussion is defined based on the manifestation of observable signs and symptoms (e.g., dizziness, difficulty with concentration, loss of consciousness, inter alia). A non-concussive head injury is when someone hits their head but does not exhibit the signs and symptoms of concussion -- IE concussion is defined by observable signs, and sub-concussive is defined as sustaining  head impacts similar (in magnitude and mechanism) to those sustained with concussion without observable signs and/or symptoms. These hits are a problem not only in football, but also with IED/bomb blasts experienced during war and potentially rugby.  (more…)
Author Interviews, Nature, Neurological Disorders, Nursing / 18.04.2019

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Elsa F. Fouragnan PhD School of Psychology (Faculty of Health and Human Sciences) University of Plymouth MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?  Response: Counterfactual thinking is a psychological process that involves the tendency to create possible alternatives to life events that are currently happening. It is very important because it gives us the ability to switch away from uninteresting activities if better ones become available. For example, if you are working or doing the housework, you may be thinking about gardening or watching a movie later. As soon as your duties are finished, you may engage in these more exciting activities. In our study, macaque monkeys were tasked to find treats under several colored cups (on a screen). Some of these cups were better than others but were not always available, thus the animals had to retain what they had learnt about the good cups in case they became available again. We found that a frontal part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex was responsible for tracking which cups were the best in order to efficiently switch to them if the opportunity arose. If this part of the brain was not functioning properly, then animals were stuck in non-optimal choices. To reveal the causal role of the anterior cingulate cortex, we used a new neurostimulation method called low-intensity repetitive ultrasound to modulates activity in this part of the brain with millimetre accuracy. (more…)
Alcohol, Author Interviews, Genetic Research, Nature, University of Pennsylvania / 05.04.2019

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Henry R. Kranzler, MD Professor of Psychiatry Perelman School of Medicine University of Pennsylvania MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Alcohol consumption and alcohol use disorder (AUD) are moderately heritable traits.  To date, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have not examined these traits in the same sample, which limits an assessment of the extent to which genetic variation is unique to one or the other or shared. This GWAS examined a large sample (nearly 275,000 individuals) from the U.S. Veterans Affairs Million Veteran Program (MVP) for whom data on both alcohol consumption and alcohol use disorder diagnoses were available from an electronic health record.  We identified 18 genetic variants that were significantly associated with either alcohol consumption, AUD, or both. Five of the variants were associated with both traits, eight with consumption only, and five with alcohol use disorder only.  (more…)
Author Interviews, Diabetes, Genetic Research, Heart Disease, Nature / 02.04.2019

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Eirini Marouli William Harvey Research Institute Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, Queen Mary University of London, London MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?   Response: Epidemiological studies suggest that shorter stature is associated with increased risk of coronary artery disease (CAD) or type 2 diabetes (T2D). It is not clear though whether these associations are causal or there are other factors mediating these effects. When randomized trials are inappropriate or impossible, we can use Mendelian Randomisation as a good alternative to study the causal relationship between a trait and a disease. Here, we examined over 800 places in the human genome known to be associated with adult height and evaluated how genetically predicted height can affect the risk of CAD or T2D. Furthermore, we evaluated the role of several risk factors including, cholesterol, triglycerides, blood pressure, body mass index, fat percentage, socio-economic parameters including education and income as well as lung function. Lung function was assessed by spirometry measures including FEV1: forced expiratory volume in 1 second, FVC: forced vital capacity. (more…)
Author Interviews, Lung Cancer, Nature, Technology / 05.03.2019

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Saeed Hassanpour, PhD Assistant Professor Departments of Biomedical Data Science, Computer Science, and Epidemiology Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth Lebanon, NH 03756 MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Lung cancer is the deadliest cancer for both men and women in the western world. The most common form, lung adenocarcinoma, requires pathologist’s visual examination of resection slides to determine grade and treatment. However, this is a hard and tedious task. Using new technologies in artificial intelligence and deep learning, we trained a deep neural network to classify lung adenocarcinoma subtypes on histopathology slides and found that it performed on par with three practicing pathologists. (more…)
Author Interviews, Infections, Nature / 28.02.2019

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: bats-mattaeMatae Ahn,MD-PhD candidate Emerging Infectious Diseases (EID) Programme Duke-NUS Medical School MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Bats, as the only flying mammals, are ‘special’ in their ability to host many highprofile viruses without suffering from disease. Such viruses including Ebola virus, Nipah virus and SARS or MERS coronaviruses, are highly pathogenic and often lethal to humans or animals, but yet cause no or minimal disease in bats. In addition, they also live very long relative to their small body size, despite elevated metabolic rates. However, what makes them special is still unclear. In this study, we discovered dampened NLRP3-mediated inflammation in bats in response to both ‘sterile’ stressors and infection with three different types of zoonotic RNA viruses. We identified multiple molecular mechanisms of altered bat NLRP3, a critical regulator of virus-induced and age-related inflammation, as the cause. Importantly, the reduced inflammation had no effect on the viral loads, which suggests enhanced immune tolerance to infection in bats. Bats’ natural ability to dampen stress-related and virusinduced inflammation may be a key mechanism underlying their long lifespans and unique viral reservoir status.  (more…)
Author Interviews, Gastrointestinal Disease, Microbiome, Nature / 11.01.2019

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr. Venkatakrishna R Jala, PhD Assistant Professor James Graham Brown Cancer Center Department of Microbiology and Immunology University of Louisville MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Humans evolved along with their gut microbiota and adapted their physiological activities to help each other. Along with consumption of healthy diets, humans must harbor the appropriate microbiota to convert the foods into available components called metabolites. These microbial metabolites play a critical role in preserving homeostasis, the development of immune systems and preventing adverse events both systemically and locally. Despite the availability of large metagenomics (bacterial sequence) data, and its associations with disease conditions, the functional dynamics of microbiota (good vs bad) in human health or diseases are yet to be defined. The host’s indigenous gut microbiota and its metabolites have emerged as key factors that greatly influence human health and disease, including inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD). IBD patients suffer from leaky gut and increased inflammation. The current study demonstrates that a microbial metabolite derived from ellagitannin/ellagic acid rich diets (e.g., pomegranate, berries) called ‘urolithin A’ and its synthetic analogue significantly enhance gut barrier function in addition to blocking the unwarranted inflammation in IBD animal models.  (more…)
Author Interviews, Autism, Nature, Pediatrics / 27.11.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Michael Lombardo, PhD Assistant professor of Psychology the University of Cyprus  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Autism is a diagnostic label we give to children with difficulties in the areas of social-communication and restricted, repetitive stereotyped behaviors and interests. The diagnosis is made based on observations about behavior and is a consensus label, meaning that clinicians can show high degrees of agreement that a given set of behaviors is ‘autism’. But aside from the diagnostic label, there is a fair degree of heterogeneity within patients that have the diagnosis. One way in which patients are heterogeneous is with regard to early language development. Some toddlers with autism are minimally verbal, while at the other end, many toddlers with autism develop language typically. An important question to answer is whether that kind of difference in language development indicates a subtype with different underlying biology. To examine this question, we first split toddlers with autism into two subtypes defined by their language outcome at 4 years of age. Some toddlers were classified as poor language outcome, because their language performance was 1 standard deviation below typical norms. Other toddlers with autism had relatively good language outcome, as their language performance by 4 years of age was within 1 standard deviation of typical norms. We also measured the biology behind these two autism subtypes. First we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which is a non-invasive method to look at blood oxygenation response that changes according to a task. Blood oxygenation changes are an indirect measure of neural activity. We used fMRI during natural sleep at around 29 months of age while the toddlers were played language stimuli through headphones to elicit neural responses to speech. Second, we measured molecular aspects of biology, by taking blood samples, isolating leukocyte cells, and then quantifying gene expression for all protein coding genes in the genome, at around the same time as the fMRI scan. (more…)
Author Interviews, Gastrointestinal Disease, Gluten, Microbiome, Nature / 17.11.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Professor Oluf Pedersen Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research University of Copenhagen MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: We focused our study on healthy people due to the world-wide bottom-up movement among healthy adults to live gluten-free or on a low-gluten diet. Therefore, we undertook a randomised, controlled, cross-over trial involving 60 middle-aged healthy Danish adults with two eight week interventions comparing a low-gluten diet (2 g gluten per day) and a high-gluten diet (18 g gluten per day), separated by a washout period of at least six weeks with habitual diet (12 g gluten per day). The two diets were balanced in number of calories and nutrients including the same total amount of dietary fibres. However, the composition of fibres differed markedly between the two diets. When the low-gluten trend started years back the trend was without any scientific evidence for health benefits. Now we bring pieces of evidence that a low-gluten diet in healthy people may be related to improved intestinal wellbeing due to changes in the intestinal microbiota which to our surprise is NOT induced by gluten itself but by the concomitant change in the type of dietary fibres linked to a low-gluten intake. (more…)