Research advances from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Intramural Research Program (IRP) often make headlines. Read the news releases that describe our most recent findings:
BETHESDA, Md. (AP) — Sam Srisatta, a 20-year-old Florida college student, spent a month living inside a government hospital here last fall, playing video games and allowing scientists to document every morsel of food that went into his mouth.
From big bowls of salad to platters of meatballs and spaghetti sauce, Srisatta noshed his way through a nutrition study aimed at understanding the health effects of ultraprocessed foods, the controversial fare that now accounts for more than 70% of the U.S. food supply. He allowed The Associated Press to tag along for a day.
“Today my lunch was chicken nuggets, some chips, some ketchup,” said Srisatta, one of three dozen participants paid $5,000 each to devote 28 days of their lives to science. “It was pretty fulfilling.”
Examining exactly what made those nuggets so satisfying is the goal of the widely anticipated research led by National Institutes of Health nutrition researcher Kevin Hall.
“What we hope to do is figure out what those mechanisms are so that we can better understand that process,” Hall said.
Scientists have found a connection between bacteria in the gut and antitumor immune responses in the liver. Their study, published online May 24 in Science, was led by researchers in the Center for Cancer Research (CCR) at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). It showed that bacteria found in the gut of mice affect the liver’s antitumor immune function. The findings have implications for understanding the mechanisms that lead to liver cancer and for therapeutic approaches to treat them. NCI is part of the National Institutes of Health.
“What we found using different tumor models is that if you treat mice with antibiotics and thereby deplete certain bacteria, you can change the composition of immune cells of the liver, affecting tumor growth in the liver,” said Tim Greten, M.D., of NCI’s CCR, who led the study. “This is a great example of how what we learn from basic research can give us insight into cancer and possible treatments.”
The microbiome is the collection of bacteria and other microorganisms that live in or on the body. In humans, the greatest proportion of the body’s total microbiome is in the gut. Despite extensive research into the relationship between the gut microbiome and cancer, the role of gut bacteria in the formation of liver cancer has remained poorly understood.
Scientists developed monoclonal antibody from Ebola survivor
A first-in-human trial evaluating an experimental treatment for Ebola virus disease has begun at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. The Phase 1 clinical trial is examining the safety and tolerability of a single monoclonal antibody called mAb114, which was developed by scientists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of NIH, and their collaborators. Investigators aim to enroll between 18 and 30 healthy volunteers aged 18 to 60. The trial will not expose participants to Ebola virus.
Ebola virus disease is a serious and often fatal illness that can cause fever, headache, muscle pain, weakness, fatigue, diarrhea, vomiting, stomach pain and hemorrhage (severe bleeding). It was first discovered in humans in 1976 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and has caused periodic cases and outbreaks in several African countries since then. The largest outbreak, which occurred in West Africa from 2014 to 2016, caused more than 28,600 infections and more than 11,300 deaths, according to the World Health Organization. In May 2018, the DRC reported an Ebola outbreak, located in Équateur Province in the northwest of the country. As of May 20, health officials have reported 51 probable or confirmed cases and 27 deaths. There are currently no licensed treatments available for Ebola virus disease, although multiple experimental therapies are being developed.
“We hope this trial will establish the safety of this experimental treatment for Ebola virus disease — an important first step in a larger evaluation process,” said NIAID Director Anthony S. Fauci, M.D. “Ebola is highly lethal, and reports of another outbreak in the DRC remind us that we urgently need Ebola treatments.”
NIH-funded study suggests need for more research into contributing factors; targeted interventions for children
New research suggests the suicide rate is roughly two times higher for black children ages 5-12 compared with white children of the same age group. The study, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), appears online May 21 in JAMA Pediatrics.
Suicide is a major public health problem and a leading cause of death in the United States. While suicide among young children is quite rare, it can be devastating to families, friends, and communities. Past patterns of national youth suicide rates revealed higher rates for white compared to black youth.
Jeffrey Bridge, Ph.D., of the Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, Columbus, Ohio, Lisa Horowitz, Ph.D., of the NIMH Intramural Research Program, and coauthors set out to investigate race-related differences in suicide rates in youth overall. Using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS), which provides fatal and nonfatal injury, violent death, and cost-of-injury data, the team of researchers analyzed the data from 2001-2015 separately for children ages 5-12 and adolescents ages 13-17.
Squares indicate the estimated natural logarithm of the age-specific incidence rate ratio (IRR): Vertical lines, 94% CI. The reference group is white youth. The 95% CIs that do not include zero are considered to be statistically significant.
Gestational diabetes may predispose women to early-stage kidney damage, a precursor to chronic kidney disease, according to a study by researchers at the National Institutes of Health and other institutions. The study appears in Diabetes Care.
Gestational diabetes occurs only in pregnancy and results when the level of blood sugar is too high. The condition increases the risk for preterm birth and cesarean delivery, among other complications. Other forms of diabetes that occur outside of pregnancy are known to increase the risk for chronic kidney disease, in which the kidneys have difficulty filtering wastes from the blood. Few studies have investigated the potential link between gestational diabetes and chronic kidney disease.
“Our findings suggest that women who have had gestational diabetes may benefit from periodic checkups to detect early-stage kidney damage and receive subsequent treatment,” said the study’s senior author, Cuilin Zhang, M.D., M.P.H., Ph.D., of the Epidemiology Branch at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).
Prion diseases are slow degenerative brain diseases that occur in people and various other mammals. No vaccines or treatments are available, and these diseases are almost always fatal. Scientists have found little evidence of a protective immune response to prion infections. Further, microglia — brain cells usually involved in the first level of host defense against infections of the brain — have been thought to worsen these diseases by secreting toxic molecules that can damage nerve cells.
Now, scientists have used an experimental drug, PLX5622, to test the role of microglia against scrapie, a prion disease of sheep. PLX5622 rapidly kills most of the microglia in the brain. When researchers gave the drug to mice infected with scrapie, microglia were eliminated and the mice died one month faster than did untreated mice. The results, published in the Journal of Virology by researchers from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, suggest that microglia can defend against a prion infection and thus slow the course of disease. The scientists hypothesize that microglia trap and destroy the aggregated prion proteins that cause brain damage.
The findings suggest that drugs that increase the helpful activity of microglia may have a role in slowing the progression of prion diseases. Researchers are now studying the details of how microglia may be able to destroy prions in the brain. The scientists note that microglia could have a similar beneficial effect on other neurodegenerative diseases associated with protein aggregation, such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease.
Microglia, shown in green, are part of the immune response that protects the brain. They could play a role in slowing the progress of prion and other neurodegenerative diseases.
Researchers have identified a compound that blocks the spread of pancreatic and other cancers in various animal models. When cancer spreads from one part of the body to another in a process called metastasis, it can eventually grow beyond the reach of effective therapies. Now, there is a new plan of attack against this deadly process, thanks to scientists at the National Institutes of Health, Northwestern University and their collaborative research partners.
The team collaborated to identify a compound, which they named metarrestin, that stopped tumor metastasis in multiple animal models. Mice treated with metarrestin also had fewer tumors and lived longer than mice that did not receive treatment. These results were published May 16, 2018 in Science Translational Medicine.
“Many drugs are aimed at stopping cancer growth and killing cancer cells,” said co-author Juan Marugan, Ph.D., group leader of the NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) Chemical Genomics Center. “However, there is no single approved drug specifically aimed at treating metastasis. Our results show metarrestin is a very promising agent that we should continue to investigate against metastasis.”
The compound metarrestin breaks down a component of cancer cells called the perinucleolar compartment (PNC). PNCs are found only in cancer cells, and in a greater number of cells in advanced cancer. In the four panels on the left, the green dots indicate the presence of PNCs in untreated pancreatic and metastatic liver tumors. On the right, treatment with metarrestin reduced the prevalence of PNCs.
A new tool developed by researchers at the National Institutes of Health has determined, for the first time, how two distinct sets of neurons in the mouse brain work together to control movement. The method, called spectrally resolved fiber photometry (SRFP), can be used to measure the activity of these neuron groups in both healthy mice and those with brain disease. The scientists plan to use the technique to better understand what goes wrong in neurological disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease. The study appeared online in the journal Neuron.
According to Guohong Cui, M.D., Ph.D., head of the In Vivo Neurobiology Group at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), part of NIH, the project began because he wanted to find out why patients with Parkinson’s disease have problems with movement. Typically, the disease motor symptoms include tremor, muscle stiffness, slowness of movement, and impaired balance.
Cui explained that an animal’s ability to move was controlled by two groups of neurons in the brain called the direct pathway (D1) and indirect pathway (D2). Based on clinical studies of patients with Parkinson’s and primate models, some researchers hypothesized that the loss of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the midbrain resulted in an imbalance of neural activities between D1 and D2. Since previous methods could not effectively distinguish different cell types in the brain, the hypothesis remained under debate. However, using SRFP, Cui’s team was able to label D1 and D2 neurons with green and red fluorescent sensors to report their neural activity.
"Our method allowed us to simultaneously measure neural activity of both pathways in a mouse as the animal performed tasks," Cui said. "In the future, we could potentially use SRFP to measure the activity of several cell populations utilizing various colors and sensors."
The striatum, part of the brain’s basal ganglia, is involved in movement control. Using the SRFP technique, Cui’s team found that different activity patterns in D1 (red) and D2 (green) pathways led to different types of movement.
NIH study cautions that more research is needed to determine if this small difference in weight poses a health risk
Women who experience vaginal bleeding for more than one day during the first trimester of pregnancy may be more likely to have a smaller baby, compared to women who do not experience bleeding in the first trimester, suggest researchers at the National Institutes of Health. On average, full-term babies born to women with more than one day of bleeding in the first trimester were about 3 ounces lighter than those born to women with no bleeding during this time. Additionally, infants born to women with more than a day of first trimester bleeding were roughly twice as likely to be small for gestational age, a category that includes infants who are healthy but small, as well as those whose growth has been restricted because of insufficient nutrition or oxygen or other causes.
The study appears in Obstetrics & Gynecology and was conducted by researchers at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and other U.S. research institutions.
The authors caution that the decrease in birthweight of infants born to women with vaginal bleeding was small. More studies are needed to determine if these infants are at risk for any additional health risks in infancy or later in life.
“The good news is that only one day of bleeding was not significantly associated with reduced growth,” said the study’s senior author, Katherine L. Grantz, M.D., an investigator in the NICHD Epidemiology Branch. “But our results suggest that even if bleeding stops before the second trimester, a pregnancy with more than one day of bleeding is at somewhat of a greater risk for a smaller baby.”
Early during the recent Ebola epidemic in West Africa, scientists speculated that the genetic diversity of the circulating Makona strain of virus (EBOV-Makona) would result in more severe disease and more transmissibility than prior strains. However, using two different animal models, National Institutes of Health scientists have determined that certain mutations stabilized early during the epidemic and did not alter Ebola disease presentation or outcome. Their work, published in Cell Reports, offers further evidence to support previous findings from molecular sequencing that the diversity of EBOV-Makona did not significantly impact the course of disease.
EBOV-Makona swept through Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone from late 2013 to early 2016. Scientists from NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) compared EBOV-Makona isolates from early in the outbreak—March 2014—to isolates circulating between five and nine months later, when certain mutations had emerged in the viral surface glycoprotein and elsewhere. They then infected mice and rhesus macaques with these various virus isolates to assess disease progression and viral shedding.
“We were unable to find any significant differences between early and late isolates lacking or carrying those mutations, suggesting that these mutations do not lead to alterations in the disease-causing ability in animal models,” the authors write.
NIH researchers combine two microscope technologies to create sharper, faster images
Scientists at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) have combined two different microscope technologies to create sharper images of rapidly moving processes inside a cell. NIBIB is part of the National Institutes of Health.
In a paper published today in Nature Methods, Hari Shroff, Ph.D., chief of NIBIB’s lab section on High Resolution Optical Imaging (HROI), describes his new improvements to traditional Total Internal Reflection Fluorescence (TIRF) microscopy. TIRF microscopy illuminates the sample at a sharp angle so that the light reflects back, illuminating only a thin section of the sample that is extremely close to the coverslip. This process creates very high contrast images because it eliminates much of the background, out-of-focus, light that conventional microscopes pick up.
While TIRF microscopy has been used in cell biology for decades, it produces blurry images of small features within cells. In the past, super-resolution microscopy techniques applied to TIRF microscopes have been able to improve the resolution, but such attempts have always compromised speed, making it impossible to clearly image objects that move rapidly. As a result, many cellular processes remain too small or fast to observe.
The rapid movements of Rab11 particles can be clearly imaged with the new instant TIRF-SIM microscope.
