Are you ready for my close-up?

So, there’s talk of another video. Starring me, again. And I know what you’re asking yourself:

“How do they do all that medical research if everybody there is clearly blind?”

While my eyesight isn’t 20/20, I have to tell you, most of us at OMRF are, in fact, capable of seeing things. Why they want another movie with me in it, what with their working eyes and all, I cannot explain.

So I’m asking you all — did any of you watch the movie on my genome? Did anybody like it? And, here’s the big one, if you’d like to see another one, what should it be about? I’ve got a few ideas, but I’d be interested to hear what you have to say.

Saved by the Beaker: The New Class

OMRF is growing. And I’m not just talking about the part of OMRF that my belt is straining to fit around.

Dario Ramirez, Ph.D., started work here on March 1. On Sept. 1, he was joined by Drs. Courtney Griffin, Tim Griffin and Mike Kinter. Next month, we’ll get Drs. Courtney Gray-McGuire, Hong Chen and Jana Barlic.

That is seven new researchers who have started at OMRF this year, for those keeping score at home. To put that in perspective, when OMRF started hiring in 1950, we had three.

I’ve had a chance to talk to most of this new crew and I’m pretty excited. Granted, that happens when I talk to any of our other scientists, too. The reason: everybody here brings a love of science and discovery to the table and in such a widely diverse set of disciplines.

Dr. Tim Griffin told me about his research into the effects of obesity on arthritis and how he thinks the pressure on joints from weight has less to do with arthritis than inflammatory chemicals that come from the fat — like it’s a completely seperate organ!

His wife, Dr. Courtney Griffin, told me about her work on the vascular system and a relationship to cancer. She also let me know that her first visit to our fair state came during last year’s horrible ice storms. Thank goodness she looked beyond the frozen streets and power outages long enough to fall in love with our institution.

Dario is so excited for the arrival of Mike Kinter, who brings with his the expertise to further both of their research goals. And Courtney Gray-McGuire is just excited to be back where good Mexican food is readily available.

You’ll be hearing a lot from our new researchers, I have no doubt, and partly because I love writing about them. For a keyboard jockey like me, understanding the science can be difficult, but each of these scientists is so driven and passionate, they make it easy to comprehend.

Now is the late-summer of our discontent

Well, wouldn’t you know it? As soon as I promise to update the blog more often, I go and get sick. That’s not a great excuse for not writing more posts, but I’ll take it.

Besides, a little coughing and sneezing may not be pleasant, but at least I don’t have PNH. What? You’ve never heard of PNH? Well, let me tell you about it.

Paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria is no walk in the park, both because it’s incredibly painful and much more rare than walking in the park. The disease starts in the bone marrow, which makes red blood cells. The abnormal marrow makes more and more red blood cells that are susceptible to harm from a part of the immune system called the complement system.

Oh, sure, it sounds so nice, so…complimentary…but when the complement system hits those abnormal red blood cells, it bursts them like balloons. And, if you haven’t heard, blood plays a fairly important role in living, so PNH can be pretty bad.

Now I’m sure you’re reading this and saying to yourself, “Why is Greg talking about this? He doesn’t know anything about science. He’s just a keyboard jockey!”

Well, that’s true. But I have been interviewing some OMRF scientists past and present who found a treatment for PNH, as well as a few locals who praise the treatment (called Soliris) for saving their lives.

And if I’ve whetted your appetite for more, then be sure to check out the upcoming issue of Findings for the story.

In the meantime, I’m going to try not to gross out my office-mate with the sounds of my sneezing and coughing and nose-blowing. It’s not PNH, but it’s not much fun, either.

The Dangers of Human Nature

Sorry for the long absence. I’m busy working on a story for the next issue of Findings and between trying to figure out the science and figure out a way to tell the story right, I guess I let Gregipedia fall between the cracks.

I’ll update you more on a few news items later — like the installation of our new, more-powerful small animal MRI and the papers published on a novel light receptor in C. elegans by Dr. Ken Miller and a new lupus-related gene variation discovered by Drs. Judith James and Patrick Gaffney — but I thought I’d go a little personal for this one.

When I was doing the video component for my DNA story, I interviewed Dr. Jim Rand. When I told him that just thinking about my future health had spurred me on to eating better and exercising more, he told me, “Great. Good luck with that. It probably won’t last.”

I’ll admit, I was a little peeved. Who was he to tell me I didn’t have the willpower and the determination to stick with a healthier diet and increased physical activity? Well, it turns out he’s just a very smart guy, since he was right.

And that’s why I chose this topic for my first new Gregipedia entry in a while — because I’ve been lax on both counts. I did revert to my old, bad habits and I did let this blog sit un-updated. But I’m back on the horse, or the wagon, or in the game or whatever. I’m trying a new method of eating better (by eating the same thing every day, hopefully keeping me from having the choice to be bad) and I’m rededicating myself to keeping the blog alive.

Sure, nobody reads it, but maybe that will change. And maybe I will, too. It can’t hurt to hope, right?

The Long Game

It’s easy to be impatient, especially in medical science.

I have a cold now. I have a broken leg now. I have lupus now.

So when do you want to get better? Well, now, of course.

Every scientist at OMRF wants to find new treatments for diseases, to ease suffering and advance medical care. But they also know that science isn’t the work of one man or one woman. It’s not all done by one department or one institution.

Science is built on the back of prior research and, unless we understand the most basic functions of the human body, how will we ever find new and better treatments for our ills?

Take the recent paper by Dr. Mike Dresser, an associate member of OMRF’s Cell Cycle and Cancer Biology Research Program, which deals with how mistakes are avoided in the cell division process meiosis.

It doesn’t sound too ”sexy,” does it? Not really. But is it vital? Absolutely. Dr. Dresser, like many researchers at OMRF, is looking at the long game.  Dr. Dresser’s paper highlights a “chaperon” system, in which incorrect bonds are pulled apart so they can realign properly.

“These movements snap the bad connections between chromosomes, ensuring that they won’t give rise to disease or abnormalities,” said Dresser. “The also regulate good connections, strengthening proper pairings between chromosomes.”

The applications for this kind of research are limitless because so much is predicated on those proper pairings. When the chromosomes don’t line up, scientists think it can lead to autism and Down syndrome. And while his research hasn’t yielded a treatment or a preventative for those conditions, it will certainly be one of the foundation blocks on which future therapies are built.

We understand that a future treatment doesn’t do any good for those with a disease today, those afraid of death tomorrow, but that’s just how science works. And I am proud every day to work for people who are making medical breaththroughs for me and my children and my grandchildren. That’s a long game well worth playing.

Collaboration is a beautiful thing

I like to think I’m a pretty funny guy. (I also like to think I’m handsome, but let’s stay in the realm of possibilities.)

Back in college, I wrote a column with a friend named Mat DeKinder — basically a funny take on the news of the day. Mat’s a funny guy, too, so I thought our little endeavor might take off. I had no idea. Mat made my writing 10 times funnier and I didn’t completely ruin his jokes, either.

At the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, collaboration is key. In the cafeteria at lunch time, it’s not uncommon to see Drs. Phil Silverman and Bob Barstead chatting. Our scientists see each other, talk with each other and share ideas with each other. It’s an environment that fosters innovation.

One recent breakthrough came from Dr. Robert Floyd, the Merrick Foundation Chair in Aging Research at OMRF, while working with Dr. Richard Kopke of the Oklahoma City-based Hough Ear Institute. Both were working on separate treatments for acute acoustic trauma — when extremely loud sounds damage and kill sensitive hair cells in the inner ear. It’s a problem affecting many Americans, including the U.S. military.

Dr. Floyd told me the compound he was using was somewhat effective and he talked with Dr. Kopke, who had another compound, that was also somewhat effective. Well, in the spirit of peanut butter and chocolate, they decided to see what a combination therapy would do. The results? In current tests, the compound is applied within 4 hours of the noise damage and almost completely reduces hearing loss.

“Hearinng loss costs the U.S. Department of Defense about $1 billion a year,” Kopke said. More damaging, though, are the costs on the quality of living for those suffering acute acoustic trauma.

Floyd said the pre-clinical results are good and that human testing is just around the corner. That’s good news for soldiers, civilians and science — and it all came together because of scientists who see the value in working together.

The Promise of Personalized Medicine

It took 13 years for the U.S. government to pass the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, or GINA.

While scientists worked feverishly, and still do, to unlock the secrets of the human genetic code, our lawmakers debated and argued and stood stock still on one issue standing in the way of bringing science to the people.  

The thing is — your genetic information might not hold good news. And there was no guarantee that, if you got a DNA test to get ahead of the problem, your insurance company wouldn’t classify any genetic abnormality as a “pre-existing condition.” In other words, you were going to get sick regardless, so they don’t have to pay for the treatment.

Kind of makes the idea of insurance useless, right? I mean, I don’t want to get sick, but I have medical insurance because I probably will at some point. But what’s the use of insurance if it won’t pay when you do get sick?

That’s where GINA comes in. It says that health insurers and employers cannot discriminate against Americans based on genetic information. The bill had passed the Senate unanimously and the House by a vote of 414 to 1.

Now I know I haven’t been wild about the current practical applications of available online DNA tests, but after talking to OMRF President Stephen Prescott, I know that the near future could hold much more promise. Personalized medicine — in which doctors look at your DNA and not only predict your future illnesses, but find which treatments are proven to work on those with your SNPs — could be here within our lifetimes.

The question I have, of course, is if people will take advantage of that personalized medicine. Let’s not forget how many of our nation’s medical epidemics are spurred on by people who avoid regular medical check ups for personal and financial reasons.

“A black hole, never to be filled.”

As I’ve talked to scientists and doctors about my genome test, I’ve always been struck by the notion that, for all the information contained in the genome, it’s not the end-all-be-all for the future of medicine.

But Dr. John Harley, one of the pre-eminent voices in the lupus genetics field, had a different take. DNA might not hold all the answers about lupus, but it definitely holds answers that can’t be found anywhere else.

“It’s not possible to understand this disease without genetics,” he says. “Without the information provided by the genome, this would be a black hole, never to be filled.”

And that’s what makes DNA so fascinating — it’s a piece of almost every medical puzzle yet to be solved, if not the majority of pieces. Without genetics research, there are a whole of lot of diseases that might never be treated or prevented or even properly diagnosed. 

Consider this fact, as well: Dr. Harley says that it was 1943 when the idea that DNA was more than just a bunch of mucus inside the cell. Think about how far have we come in just 60 years. The future ahead of us is bright with the possibilities of what the next 5, 10 or 50 years will bring.  

Data-Mining My DNA

Learning about your genome is a lot like dream analysis. It’s largely an exercise in tying what you know to what you’re told. And some of it seems downright wrong.

Part of it is because information about DNA is both definitive — you already are who you are — and part of it is subjective — the probability that some of your features are due in part to a SNP (single nucleotide polymophism).

Not to gross you out, but according to 23andMe, I have wet earwax. It is offered as fact on their site, as if someone has been snooping in my ears, but I’m not sure they have it right when they say that my double cytosine genotype on SNP rs17822931 makes my earwax “wet”.

If anything, when I dutifully swab my ears, it seems pretty dry.

A lot of the rest of the information is conditional, just talking about my chances to develop a disease vs. others like me. For instance, it says 10 percent of people with European ancestry and my genotype will have colorectal cancer between the ages of 30 and 89. The average for people with European ancestry, regardless of genotype, is of 8.7 percent.

But do I have colorectal cancer? I hope not. And genotyping isn’t going to tell me if I do or don’t — it just lets me know, based on my genes, how likely I am to develop it between now and my 90th birthday.   

That kind of thing is easy to freak out about. Not to take too determanistic a view, but what can I really do? Eat right. Exercise. Get regular check-ups at the doctor’s office.

You know: The stuff you are supposed to be doing anyway. 

If my genetic test has done anything for me, it’s opened my eyes to my health. At age 29, I’m no teen-ager, but I must have been young at heart, because I just never considered that I could ever get cancer or Alzheimer’s Disease or multiple sclerosis.

The test freaked me out at first, but as I’ve gone along, I realized that my DNA was going to do what it’s going to do, regardless of me knowing. And all I can really do to protect myself is the same stuff I should have been doing before the test. Thinking about the results spurred me to action. That seems like a good lesson, even if the price was a little expensive.

Risky Business

There are definite benefits to working at OMRF. And I’m not just talking about the 401k.

For a writer, getting to walk the halls with some of the finest scientific minds in the world is a real treat. During my reporting days, I was lucky to find a source who knew what he or she was talking about — here I’m lucky if I can take notes fast enough to jot down everything the scientists say.

And I was very lucky to squeeze into OMRF President Stephen Prescott’s schedule to talk about my DNA and whether or not I was going to die.

Well, the answer is yes, I will die (…and the crowd goes wild!), but probably not of a rare genetic disease and probably not tomorrow. Dr. Prescott told me about risk and how few people really understand it.

I tried to explain that I was an expert on Risk and that you just have to get Austrialia and Siam to start an empire, but Dr. Prescott said he was talking about a different kind of risk.

A lot of scientific journals and news reports use relative risk, mostly because it’s easier to calculate and it sounds a lot scarier, he said. Relative risk, for instance, told me I was 30% more likely to get Lou Gehrig’s Disease, or ALS. (Another scientist, Dr. Kenneth Hensley, told me he thinks the logic is flawed further, but that’s another topic.)

“Thirty percent sounds like a lot, right?” he asked me, as if trying to goad me to tears. “But the average risk for anybody to get Lou Gehrig’s Disease is about 1 in 100,000. Which means your additional risk actually puts you at 1.3 in 100,000. That’s not so bad.”

That 1.3 number is absolute risk, which is a more logical, and more difficult to figure, statistic. But if you talk about absolute risk, you put things in perspective and it suddenly becomes a lot clearer that I shouldn’t be freaking out about ALS.

I should be freaking out about prostate cancer, instead. After all, according to my genes, I’ve got a 1 in 3 chance of coming down with that particular malady. Also, I’ve got a bit of family history with prostate cancer. Yikes.

Do you pay attention to your family medical history? Is there anything in particular you’re looking out for or actively working against? Be the first on your block to leave a comment below.