(Press-News.org) Michael Mengel, a pathology researcher with the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry, has found a new way to analyze biopsies from heart transplant patients by looking at their genes. This allows him to make an early prediction whether the transplant is working.
This is extremely important in heart transplant patients because a successful outcome depends completely on doing a biopsy of the heart tissue and prescribing treatments if necessary. In other organs transplants, doctors can use other measurements.
It's hoped the new technology and process developed in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry will become a standard of care worldwide, and improve patient care within the next three to five years, says Mengel.
Using what is called gene chip technology, Mengel can look at all 54,000 human genes of a heart transplant biopsy. Then, by using software algorithms developed by the team at the faculty's Alberta Transplant Applied Genomics Centre, he can reduce them to a dozen single numbers, all of which are necessary to interpret what is happening and make a diagnosis.
"This system of molecular annotation to predict prognosis is better than anything else available currently," said Mengel. "We get more information out of the tissue than we were able to before we could read all the genes."
The current standard of care is for pathologists to use a microscope and assess single cells in the diseased tissue. The problem is, pathologists can see tissue lesions but can't see finer details like the difference between tissue injury and rejection.
With Mengel's new approach they can go beyond the microscope and assess changes in the molecules in a tissue. This helps pathologists tell the difference between certain disease processes. Based on such improved diagnosis, physicians can start appropriate treatment earlier, further improving the patient's long-term outcome after getting a heart transplant.
"Molecules also give mechanistic insight and can help to discover new drug targets," adds Mengel.
The group is getting close to having this used worldwide in clinics. The next trial, which will begin in 2011, will be an international multi-centre validation trial. They'll send the new type of biopsy results to transplant physicians across the United States, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom and get feedback on the process and how efficient and useful the data is in a clinical setting.
He's optimistic that in a few years, pathologists and transplant doctors elsewhere will start using the process he and his team have developed. "That (time frame) sounds long for individual patients, but in terms of device development, in the time frames the health-care industry usually calculates things, it is a very short period because they usually think in terms of 10 or 15 years," notes Mengel. "It's not more research; it's already application in real patients."
The Alberta Transplant Applied Genomics Centre in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry is leading the world in this field. The centre's director, Phil Halloran, has worked in transplant immunology for more than 30 years. Recently this renowned group published work with gene chips and kidney transplants, showing the molecules could better predict outcome than any other clinical or pathological parameter.
The group's recent work in cardiac transplant patients is published in American Journal of Transplantation.
INFORMATION:
END
The seeds that you plant in your backyard garden next spring — and farmers sow in their fields — may have a guardian angel that helps them sprout, stay healthy, and grow to yield bountiful harvests. It's a thin coating of chemicals termed a "seed treatment" that can encourage seeds to germinate earlier in the season, resist insects and diseases, and convey other advantages. These new seed defenders are the topic of an article in the current issue of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), ACS' weekly newsmagazine.
C&EN Senior Business Editor Melody Voith describes a boom ...
CHICAGO --- We all know that living a stressful lifestyle can take its toll, making us age faster and making us more susceptible to the cold going around the office.
The same appears to be true of neurons in the brain. According to a new Northwestern Medicine study published Nov. 10 in the journal Nature, dopamine-releasing neurons in a region of the brain called the substantia nigra lead a lifestyle that requires lots of energy, creating stress that could lead to the neurons' premature death. Their death causes Parkinson's disease.
"Why this small group of neurons ...
Fear is an adaptive response, essential to the survival of many species. This behavioural adaptation may be innate but can also be a consequence of conditioning, during the course of which an animal learns that a particular stimulus precedes an unpleasant event. There is a large amount of data indicating that the amygdala, a particular structure in the brain, is strongly involved during the learning of "conditioned" fear. However, until now, the underlying neuronal circuits have remained largely unknown. Now, research involving several Swiss and German teams and a researcher ...
(Garrison, NY) Organizations that seek to provide health care, food, and other services to people held in drug detention centers in developing countries often face ethical dilemmas: Are they doing more good than harm? Are they helping detainees or legitimizing a corrupt system and ultimately building its capacity to detain and abuse more people?
Such dilemmas are explored in an article coauthored by Nancy Berlinger and Michael Gusmano, research scholars at The Hastings Center, along with Roxanne Saucier and Daniel Wolfe of the Open Society Institute, and Nicholas Thomson ...
DALLAS – Nov. 11, 2010 – New findings by researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center suggest that serotonin – a brain chemical known to help regulate emotion, mood and sleep – might also have anti-diabetic properties.
The findings, appearing online this week in Nature Neuroscience, also offer a potential explanation for why individuals prescribed certain kinds of anti-psychotic drugs that affect serotonin signaling sometimes have problems with their metabolism, including weight gain and the development of diabetes.
"In this paper, we describe a circuit in the brain ...
The November/December issue of the International Journal of Plant Sciences explores the current state of our knowledge of natural selection in plants.
"Plants were crucially important to Darwin's development of the theory of natural selection (six of his books were on plants)," writes Jeffrey Conner, a biologist at Michigan State University and guest editor of the issue. "Plants are still crucially important to the study of natural selection in the field."
The issue features reviews and original research articles that explore multiple aspects of this complex topic. ...
PASADENA, Calif.—The eerie music in the movie theater swells; the roller coaster crests and begins its descent; something goes bump in the night. Suddenly, you're scared: your heart thumps, your stomach clenches, your throat tightens, your muscles freeze you in place. But fear doesn't come from your heart, your stomach, your throat, or your muscles. Fear begins in your brain, and it is there—specifically in an almond-shaped structure called the amygdala—that it is controlled, processed, and let out of the gate to kick off the rest of the fear response.
In this week's ...
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — When a foreign object such as a catheter enters the body, bacteria may not only invade it but also organize into a slick coating — a biofilm — that is highly resistant to antibiotics. Like sophisticated organized crime rings, biofilms cannot be defeated by a basic approach of conventional means. Instead doctors and drug developers need sophisticated new intelligence that reveals the key players in the network and how they operate. New research led by biologists at Brown University provides exactly that dossier on some key proteins in ...
MADISON, WI November 8, 2010 -- Conversion of sorghum grass to ethanol has increased with the interest in renewable fuel sources. Researchers at Iowa State University examined 12 varieties of sorghum grass grown in single and double cropping systems. The experiment was designed to test the efficiency of double cropping sorghum grass to increase its yield for biofuel production.
The author of the report, Ben Goff, found that using sorghum from a single-cropping system was more effective for the production of ethanol. Since most of the ethanol currently produced in the ...
CORVALLIS, Ore. – There may be many similarities between the importance of large predators in marine and terrestrial environments, researchers concluded in a recent study, which examined the interactions between wolves and elk in the United States, as well as sharks and dugongs in Australia.
In each case, the major predators help control the populations of their prey, scientists said. But through what's been called the "ecology of fear" they also affect the behavior of the prey, with ripple impacts on other aspects of the ecosystem and an ecological significance that ...
