IRP Discoveries

The Heartache of Discrimination

Allana T. Forde Unpacks Racial Disparities in Heart Health

black man having chest pains

Discrimination comes in many forms, and people experience it and cope with it in different ways. The accumulation of stress arising from discrimination can lead to wear and tear on the body in a process called ‘weathering’, which ultimately harms cardiovascular health. This is one of the key reasons Black Americans have a higher rate of cardiovascular disease than all other racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. and are much more likely to die from cardiovascular conditions than other racial and ethnic groups.

NIH Stadtman Investigator Allana T. Forde, Ph.D., M.P.H., hopes to reduce these startling health disparities by examining how psychosocial stressors, including discrimination, affect the cardiovascular health of subgroups of the Black population, including Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Latino, and African American individuals. She also endeavors to identify the protective and adaptive factors that impact the relationship between discrimination and cardiovascular health. In honor of American Heart Month, I spoke with Dr. Forde about her research on discrimination and cardiovascular health in Black Americans, as well as how her research might improve cardiovascular health and inform cardiovascular disease prevention strategies.

Alternative Therapy Relieves Immunotherapy’s Neurological Consequences

Case Studies Highlight New Way to Treat Common Side Effect

child with cancer

New medical treatments nearly always come packaged with new side effects. CAR-T cell therapy, a game-changing ‘immunotherapy’ for cancer, is no exception. However, a set of case studies reported by IRP researchers could help physicians better contend with one of the therapy’s most worrisome complications.

CAR-T cell therapy involves collecting immune cells called T cells from a patient's blood, genetically modifying them to turn them into cancer killers, growing millions of the modified cells in the lab, and then returning the cancer-seeking missiles to the patient’s body. As promising as the approach is for eliminating cancer, the first CAR-T cell therapy was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) only a bit more than six years ago, so clinicians are still figuring out the best ways to manage its less desirable effects.

Brain Pathway Amplifies Pain After Injury

Mouse Study Could Aid Development of Treatments for Chronic Pain

patient with shoulder injury talks with doctor

Getting hurt or sick is bad enough, but millions of patients around the world continue to experience pain or hypersensitivity even after their ailment resolves itself. Despite the prevalence of chronic pain, few effective treatments are available, especially ones without the potential for addiction that opioid medications carry. However, new IRP research has shown that suppressing the electrical firing of neurons in a certain brain area can alleviate injury-induced hypersensitivity in mice, providing a promising new target for treatments aimed at relieving chronic pain.

Delivering on Maternal Health

IRP’s Katherine Grantz Develops Tools to Predict Pregnancy Complications

pregnant woman in hospital

Advancements in medicine have reduced the risk of childbearing dramatically, but rates of maternal death have been creeping up in recent years. The reasons are varied. Older first-time parents, greater health concerns like obesity and hypertension, and lack of access to maternity care are important factors.

In observance of Maternal Health Awareness Day on January 23, we spoke with Katherine Grantz, M.D., a maternal-fetal medicine specialist and senior investigator at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute on Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). She is trying to improve health for pregnant people and their babies experiencing complications like gestational diabetes and hypertension, as well as reduce preterm deliveries and unnecessary C-sections.

Synthetic Materials Influence Body’s Healing Response

Research Could Lead to New Strategies for Treating Injuries

doctor examining knee after surgery

Modern medical advances mean that many people are not “only flesh and blood.” Mechanical devices and substances created in medical labs are commonly replacing or being added to parts of people’s bodies. A new IRP study has shed light on how some of those materials might influence the body’s healing process, providing insights that could eventually spur the creation of new ones that influence the behavior of the body’s immune system and allow doctors to better direct how the body repairs itself.

Gene Therapy Protects Neurons From Alzheimer’s Disease

New Approach Preserves Cognitive Abilities in Pre-Symptomatic Mice

diagram showing a virus entering a cell and delivering a gene into its nucleus

Cooks preparing traditional holiday feasts will surely find that a fire extinguisher can effectively quench an oven inferno, but it would probably be better if the oven never caught fire in the first place. Similarly, Alzheimer’s researchers have focused much more on putting out the biological fires scorching patients’ brains than on making brain cells ‘fireproof.’ A new IRP study in mice, however, suggests better results might be achieved with an approach specifically designed to make patients’ neurons more resilient.

Taming Inflammation in the Intestines

IRP’s Warren Strober Breaks Down the Causes of Inflammatory Bowel Disease

man with stomach pains

For many, the holiday season brings expectations of delicious meals and treats with family and friends, but the nearly 1.6 million Americans who have inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) may need to skip these delights or endure serious digestive distress. It’s fitting, then, that the first week of December is Crohn’s and Colitis Awareness Week, an occasion that calls attention to the two conditions lumped together under the umbrella of IBD.

Of course, no awareness week is needed to remind IRP senior investigator Warren Strober, M.D., of the importance of learning more about those two conditions. An expert in how the immune system operates within the digestive system, Dr. Strober has spent decades looking for ways to provide relief for IBD sufferers.

Seeking Antibiotic Alternatives to Annihilate Infections

IRP’s Darryl Zeldin Investigates New Ways to Combat Bacterial Pneumonia

a pile of pills

Our immune system is supposed to block infections like pneumonia, and in most instances, it does. Even so, nearly 1 million Americans each year become sick enough from pneumonia to require a visit to the hospital, and for about 50,000, the lung infection is deadly.

Multiple types of infectious organisms can cause pneumonia, and doctors use antibiotics to treat cases caused by bacteria. Unfortunately, bacteria are resilient organisms that have waged an evolutionary battle against our antibiotics ever since penicillin was first discovered, leading to alarming rates of antibiotic-resistant infections. It’s no wonder, then, that the public health community calls attention to this life-threatening conundrum each November during Antibiotic Awareness Week.

Antibody Assault Shows Promise Against Dormant HIV

Treatment Strategy Could Mop Up Virus Hiding in Patients’ Bodies

antibodies attacking a virus

As temperatures drop in the fall, a variety of species from groundhogs to bears prepare to wait out the winter in their dens. Much like these animals, HIV also goes into hibernation when conditions are tough, a trait that has long stymied efforts to develop a cure. However, IRP researchers recently tested a promising strategy that might one day be used to flush out and kill dormant remnants of HIV.

A Weaker MRI Scanner Shows Its Strength

Less Powerful Magnetic Fields Improve Heart and Lung Imagery

a person getting an MRI scan

On November 8, 1895, a physics professor in Bavaria was working in his darkened laboratory when he noticed glimmers of light breaking through a piece of heavy black paper and lighting up a screen behind it. As he placed thicker and heavier items between the source of light and the screen, the light remained. That was the day Wilhelm Röntgen accidentally discovered x-rays and changed medicine forever.

As we celebrate World Radiology Day on the 128th anniversary of that discovery, medical imaging now allows people to see inside the human body with a clarity Dr. Röntgen scarcely could have imagined. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), in particular, has seen huge advances due to the development of bigger and stronger magnets. In contrast to that trend, IRP Stadtman Investigator Adrienne Campbell-Washburn, Ph.D., has instead combined better software and hardware with a less powerful magnetic field to create a new type of ‘low-field’ MRI that is particularly useful for taking pictures of the heart and lungs and for guiding minimally invasive procedures.