Diamonte Jones – iPrecision Immunomedicine

Unlocking Secrets of the Heart: Simple Scan Could Identify Patients at Risk

Diamonte Jones — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 16:11:19 +0000

Frederick H. Epstein, PhD (left) & Amit R. Patel, MD (right)

UVA Health researchers, led by Dr. Frederick H. Epstein, have developed a groundbreaking MRI technique to assess the composition of fat surrounding the heart, known as epicardial adipose tissue. This noninvasive approach could help identify patients at risk for heart disease by analyzing fat composition, which may contribute to serious conditions like coronary artery disease and heart failure. Early findings suggest that excessive saturated fatty acids in this fat are linked to worse cardiac outcomes, and researchers hope that targeted lifestyle or medical interventions could improve heart health. Their work, recently published in Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, represents a major step toward more precise heart disease detection and treatment. Read more about this research below.

Dr. Epstein and Dr. Patel are both associated faculty of iPRIME and have previously received faculty seed funding for our initiative to support their innovative research in precision immunomedicine.

Read the article

Myles Kim, PhD (UVA) & Katrin Nitz, PhD (Mayo) have been awarded a mini-grant of $50,000 for their work in developing a tissue/disease-specific training model in atherosclerotic plaques.

Diamonte Jones — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 14:10:11 +0000

Myles M. Kim, PhD

The LeDucq CHECKPOINT ATHERO aims to characterize the cell type specific immune checkpoint (IC) expression profiles during atherogenesis. Transcriptomics of atherosclerotic plaques helps detail mechanistic IC signaling pathways. Recently, single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) has become an integral part of cardiovascular research and superseded bulkRNA-seq to gain insight intoa single-cell resolution. These two techniques are closely related: scRNA-seq data retains cell-specific barcode information. Removing this barcode effectively converts it into bulkRNA-seq. The reserve conversion–from bulkRNA-seq back to scRNA-seq remains nearly impossible. In this project, they develop and train a machine-learning model using a Gaussian-mixture variational autoencoder for converting bulkRNA-seq data into synthetic scRNA-seq data. We will use bulk and scRNA-seq data from the aortas of a 30-week old ApoE-/- mice cohort to train and test the model to generate representative scRNA-seq data. This model will be applied to existing RNA-seq data from a time-course atherosclerosis study to gain single-cell level insights.

Congratulations to Myles and Katrin!

Jeffrey Wilson MD, PhD Assistant Professor, Division of Allergy Department of Medicine and his collaborator, Corinne Keet MD, PhD from UNC have been awarded a $4.1M NIH grant to study common food allergens and their potential association with cardiovascular disease.

Diamonte Jones — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 18:07:25 +0000

Jeffrey Wilson MD, PhD

Corinne Keet MD, PhD

Food allergies that result in noticeable symptoms, such as hives, swelling or anaphylaxis, are relatively uncommon. However, nearly 1 in 5 adults are ‘silently’ producing IgE antibodies to food allergens without showing any overt symptoms. Recent work by Wilson and colleagues discovered a previously unrecognized link between IgE antibodies to cow’s milk and other common food allergens and an increased risk of cardiovascular mortality. This association was found by measuring antibodies in banked blood samples from over 5,000 adults who were followed longitudinally for about 15 years. The strength of the relationship with cardiovascular mortality was similar to well known risk factors for heart disease, including smoking, diabetes and hypertension and suggests an opportunity for precision nutritional prevention of cardiovascular disease. The finding was recently covered by 125 new outlets, including U.S News and World Report.

This new award allows for the next critical steps to understand the relationship between food specific IgE and atherosclerotic plaque resulting in cardiovascular disease. The National Institute of Health recently awarded Dr. Wilson almost 1.1 million dollars to continue this work here at UVA, with additional funding for his collaborators at the University of North Carolina. This important research endeavor is also supported by a UVA Strategic Investment Fund (SIF) Prominence to Preeminence (P2PE) award: Immunology, Imaging and Informatics for Precision ImmunoMedicine (iPRIME). iPRIME provides investigators an ecosystem of support personnel from the clinical side of consenting patients and reading the complex imaging, to banking the high-quality samples at the bench. Over 600 samples from the Coronary Assesssment in VA (CAVA)-cohort will be used to examine the relationship between IgE to food allergens and atherosclerotic plaque.