(Press-News.org)
Surgeons in the United States perform nearly 600,000 coronary artery stent procedures and bypass surgeries every year.
They are the most common cardiovascular operations, and yet many fail within a few years because treatment damages the endothelium — a microscopically thin layer of cells lining blood vessels. Healthy endothelial cells are crucial to healing and long-term success.
Now, Scott Johnstone, an assistant professor with Virginia Tech’s Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC, and collaborators have identified a protein vital to the healing process. The study was published this month in Heart and Circulatory Physiology.
“For the first time in a living, functioning system, we understand pathways that are super important for endothelial wound healing to occur,” said Johnstone, who is part of the research institute's Center for Vascular and Heart Research. “This is crucial when we’re thinking about drug treatments, to ensure we don’t interfere with the normal healing process.”
The study aimed to discover how endothelial cells recover and vessels heal normally when torn or broken in surgery, to learn how to aid healing.
Endothelial cells line every blood vessel in the body in a layer just a single-cell thick. They are around 10 times thinner than a human hair, but they form one of the most important barriers in our body controlling blood vessel health.
In a previous study, Johnstone found the endothelium is often damaged or lost during heart coronary bypass operations that use a section of saphenous vein transplanted from the leg. It’s also well-known that when stents are applied, the endothelium is destroyed and won’t regrow over the stent.
“Impaired endothelium repair is at the center of why some surgeries fail,” Johnstone said. “When the endothelium is lost, it can lead to an expanded immune response by the body where other cells arrive and block the vessel over again.”
A protein called connexin 43, which forms channels between cells to allow them to signal to each other and coordinate their responses, is known to be involved in skin wound healing, but the protein’s role in endothelial healing was unknown.
Johnstone and his team analyzed nearly 11,000 individual cells from mouse blood vessels to learn whether connexin 43 plays a part in vessel healing. They found that after injury, endothelial cells produced more of the protein. When the researchers deactivated the gene in mice, healing slowed significantly — suggesting connexin 43 helps blood vessels recover after damage.
This suggests that connexin 43 helps the blood vessel heal after damage. Johnstone and his team think the protein could be a target for new therapies to improve recovery and reduce complications after vascular surgery.
“We want to find out how to get back to a healthy vessel, so we need to understand what makes a healthy vessel,” said Johnstone, who also holds a faculty appointment in Virginia Tech’s Department of Biological Sciences.. “And if we can do that, we can inform doctors what types of treatments may stop these essential cells from healing a vessel to allow it to perform in the way that it should.”
This study was funded by the American Heart Association, the National Institutes of Health, Virginia Tech, and the Seale Innovation Fund at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute.
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FAPESP and Uruguay’s National Research and Innovation Agency (ANII) are hosting the FAPESP Day Uruguay symposium tomorrow (11/13) and Friday (11/14) in Montevideo. The event aims to foster partnerships between researchers from São Paulo and Uruguay in strategic areas of mutual interest.
The event will have a similar structure to the FAPESP Week series, which has had 24 previous editions. However, it will have a shorter program focused on three themes: Oceanography, Strategies and Policies for Sustainable Animal Protein Production, and Forestry for Production and Conservation: Innovations ...
Contact:
Katy Lenard, +1-202-494-2584, klenard@burness.com
Preeti Singh, +1 301-280-5722, psingh@burness.com
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The weeks leading up to a major surgery can be a time of uncertainty and worry for patients, many of whom anticipate the need for rehabilition to get back on their feet. But if patients improve their physical and mental health prior to surgery, a process called prehabilitation or prehab, they can reduce the risk of complications afterward.
The problem is that many patients, even when directed to change their diet, increase their physical activity and get plenty of sleep, fail to make significant changes before surgery.
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In the future, your clothes might come from vats of living microbes. Reporting in the Cell Press journal Trends in Biotechnology on November 12, researchers demonstrate that bacteria can both create fabric and dye it in every color of the rainbow—all in one pot. The approach offers a sustainable alternative to the chemical-heavy practices used in today’s textile industry.
“The industry relies on petroleum-based synthetic fibers and chemicals for dyeing, which include carcinogens, ...
Astronomers using the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton space observatory and the LOFAR telescope have definitively spotted an explosive burst of material thrown out into space by another star – a burst powerful enough to strip away the atmosphere of any unlucky planet in its path.
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A new study shows, for the first time, that cow cells can naturally become immortal—continuing to divide indefinitely without genetic modification or any abnormal transformation. This overturns long-held assumptions that bovine cells could only be immortalized through gene editing, providing a safe, stable, and scalable source of cells for cultivated beef production. The finding removes one of the biggest technical and regulatory barriers to producing affordable cultivated beef, a potential game-changer for creating sustainable, ethical meat without the environmental toll of traditional livestock farming.
On a mission to ...
CAMBRIDGE, MA -- MIT researchers have developed a lightweight polymer film that is nearly impenetrable to gas molecules, raising the possibility that it could be used as a protective coating to prevent solar cells and other infrastructure from corrosion, and to slow the aging of packaged food and medicines.
The polymer, which can be applied as a film mere nanometers thick, completely repels nitrogen and other gases, as far as can be detected by laboratory equipment, the researchers found. That degree of impermeability ...
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Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Alyssa Harris, MPH, email alyssa.harris@vizientinc.com.
To ...
About The Study: The findings of this cohort study suggest that sexual assault may increase the risk of developing functional somatic disorder (FSD), involving multiple body systems. Functional somatic disorder is characterized by persistent physical symptoms and substantial disability. Despite limitations from small case samples in some FSD subtypes, the pooled analysis underscores the high risk of FSD, emphasizing the critical need for further research and targeted interventions to address the long-term biopsychosocial consequences of sexual assault.
Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Sofie ...
