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.
The National Institutes of Health has selected five researchers as new Lasker Clinical Research Scholars as part of a joint initiative with the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation to foster the next generation of great clinical scientists.
This highly competitive program provides talented, early-stage researchers the opportunity to carry out independent clinical and translational research for five to seven years at the NIH. The researchers also have the possibility of additional years of financial support, at the NIH or an NIH-funded research institution, upon project review.
The scholars are Rebecca Brown, M.D.; Christian Hinrichs, M.D.; Beth Kozel, M.D., Ph.D.; Armin Raznahan, M.D., Ph.D.; and Natalie Shaw, M.D. Kozel was recruited from St. Louis Children's Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis; Shaw was recruited from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston. The others were recruited from time-limited assistant clinical investigator positions within the NIH. They join five NIH Lasker Scholars hired since 2012.
"NIH hopes to serve as a catalyst for a national effort to nurture clinician-scientists by providing these talented scholars with the opportunities and protected research time they need to thrive," said NIH Director Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D. "With 10 total scholars, it's thrilling to see the Lasker Scholar Program vision taking flight."
Brown works in the Diabetes, Endocrinology, and Obesity Branch of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. Her laboratory studies extreme insulin resistance as well as the role of leptin, the "satiety hormone," on metabolism and weight gain. By studying rare diseases of insulin and leptin regulation, Brown hopes to provide insights and ultimately treatments for common conditions such as obesity and the metabolic syndrome.
Hinrichs works in the Experimental Transplantation and Immunology Branch of the Center for Cancer Research in the National Cancer Institute. He researches immunotherapy for HPV+ cancers including cervical, oropharyngeal, anal, vulvar, vaginal, and penile malignancies. Hinrichs laboratory has discovered personalized T cell and gene therapies for HPV+ cancers. As a Lasker Scholar, he will be developing these treatments in clinical trials, investigating why they work in some patients and not in others, and working to discover additional new treatments.
Kozel is a geneticist and a matrix and vascular biologist at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. She seeks to better understand the factors that influence vascular disease severity in patients with rare connective tissue disorders. The majority of her work is focused on the study of two elastin insufficiency-related diseases: Williams syndrome, a neurodevelopmental condition, and isolated supravalvular aortic stenosis.
Raznahan leads the Developmental Neurogenomics Unit in the Child Psychiatry Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health. He combines neuroimaging and genomic and systems-biology approaches to map human brain development and genetically-defined disorders that increase risk for neuropsychiatric impairment. This work aims to identify sets of genes and brain systems that can account for the emergence of a shared behavioral syndrome (e.g., autism) across distinct genetic disorders.
Shaw conducts research in the Clinical Research Branch at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and is also an adjunct faculty member at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine. She is interested in the environmental and genetic control of pubertal development and, specifically, in the effect of sleep disruption and obesity on reproductive hormone secretion. As a Lasker Scholar, Shaw's work will focus on the genetics behind the timing of pubertal development in adolescent girls.
Lasker Scholars have access to the NIH Clinical Center, the largest hospital in the world devoted to clinical research. The Lasker Foundation will provide additional developmental support to the scholars while they are working at NIH by funding travel to scientific meetings and providing the opportunity to participate in selected foundation activities, including the Lasker Award ceremonies. Learn more about the program at https://www.nih.gov/science/laskerscholar.
National Institutes of Health (NIH) scientists studying inflammation of the brain have discovered why certain immune responses, which typically help cells recognize and fight viral and bacterial infections, can sometimes be harmful to the brain. Many brain disorders involve the death of neurons, or nerve cells, but how these neurons die is not well understood. A new study in The Journal of Immunology describes how the activation of normally protective immune responses causes nerve cells to die and identifies the protein responsible, providing a potential target for therapeutic intervention.
A research team led by scientists at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has discovered that a protein essential for building key hearing structures in the inner ear also plays a critical role in maintaining them throughout life. The researchers report that healthy hearing involves two distinct forms of a molecular motor protein called myosin 15 (MYO15A)—one form that helps build stereocilia, and a second, much longer, version of the protein that is needed to maintain stereocilia. Stereocilia are the finger-like projections that extend from the surface of hair cells, the inner ear's sensory cells.
NIH human and mouse study may open an unexplored path for finding treatments
Scientists at the National Institutes of Health discovered that reactivation of ancient viral genes embedded in the human genome may cause the destruction of neurons in some forms of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The results, published in Science Translational Medicine, suggest a link between human endogenous retroviral genes (HERVs) and ALS. The findings also raise the question of whether antiretroviral drugs, similar to those used for suppressing HIV, may help some ALS patients.
An international team of scientists from the 1000 Genomes Project Consortium has created the world’s largest catalog of genomic differences among humans, providing researchers with powerful clues to help them establish why some people are susceptible to various diseases. While most differences in peoples’ genomes — called variants — are harmless, some are beneficial, while others contribute to diseases and conditions, ranging from cognitive disabilities to susceptibilities to cancer, obesity, diabetes, heart disease and other disorders. Understanding how genomic variants contribute to disease may help clinicians develop improved diagnostics and treatments, in addition to new methods of prevention.
The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) has reorganized its divisional structure to integrate its research portfolio, promote translational research and increase efficiencies. The new structure will incorporate research on clinical neuroscience, brain development and behavioral treatment development into existing and newly formed components of NIDA divisions. NIDA is part of the National Institutes of Health.
“We believe the reorganization will allow us to take advantage of new scientific opportunities, especially those addressing multidisciplinary and translational science,” said NIDA Director Nora D. Volkow, M.D.
NIH study finds mothers’ use of tenofovir tied to lower bone mineral content in babies
Infants exposed in the womb to a drug used to treat HIV and reduce the transmission of HIV from mother to child, may have lower bone mineral content than those exposed to other anti-HIV drugs, according to a National Institutes of Health study.
Current standards may misclassify certain fetuses as growth-restricted
Current standards for ultrasound evaluation of fetal growth may lead to misclassification of up to 15 percent of fetuses of minority mothers as being too small, according to a study by researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other institutions.
National Institutes of Health scientists and their colleagues identified a previously unappreciated role for the soft palate during research to better understand how influenza (flu) viruses acquire the ability to move efficiently between people. In studies using ferrets, the team collected evidence that this patch of mucous-coated soft tissue separating the mouth from the nasal cavity is a key site for the emergence of flu viruses with a heightened ability to spread through the air. The finding could aid efforts to define the properties governing flu virus transmissibility and predict which viruses are most likely to spark pandemics.
The research was led by Kanta Subbarao, M.D., of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and Ram Sasisekharan, Ph.D., of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. Their report is published online in the journal Nature.
Prion diseases—incurable, ultimately fatal, transmissible neurodegenerative disorders of mammals—are believed to develop undetected in the brain over several years from infectious prion protein. In a new study, National Institutes of Health (NIH) scientists report they can detect infectious prion protein in mouse brains within a week of inoculation. Equally surprising, the protein was generated outside blood vessels in a place in the brain where scientists believe drug treatment could be targeted to prevent disease. The study, from NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), appears in the Sept. 22 issue of mBio.
