Heart Alert

Early detection is key when it comes to heart attacks. Now the University of Miami Health System is conducting a clinical trial on a device designed to track significant changes in the heart’s electrical signal and alert patients to seek medical attention—even if they aren’t experiencing obvious or typical symptoms. The investigational study of the AngelMed Guardian monitor will play a significant role in FDA approval. The subcutaneous device connected inside of the heart would be able to detect any cardiac changes that indicate a heart attack is about to occur, says Claudia A. Martinez Bermudez, who heads this UHealth clinical trial. Initial studies suggest the monitor could help reduce the time it takes potential heart attack patients to get to a hospital from the current average of two to three hours to just 20 minutes.

Crash Diet

Can stressful headlines expand your waistline? That’s the conclusion of a study Juliano Laran, assistant professor of marketing in the School of Business Administration, conducted with doctoral student Anthony Salerno. Their research, published in the February edition of the journal Psychological Science, suggests that bad news triggers a “live for today” impulse that leads people to eat more—and to eat higher-calorie foods with the expectation the sustenance will last longer. Subjects subconsciously primed with information about adversity during a mock taste test consumed nearly 40 percent more high-calorie food than those primed with neutral messages. Within the adversity information group, those asked to taste a “higher-calorie candy” ate nearly 70 percent more compared with those in the group offered a “lower-calorie” version of the candy to try (in reality, both received regular M&Ms). The neutral message control groups consumed roughly the same amount of chocolate, regardless of purported calorie content. Laran says it wasn’t taste but “a longing for calories” that caused the reactions.

Strokes & Stems

The first two stroke patients have been enrolled in a phase 2 clinical trial of a revolutionary new treatment for ischemic stroke being conducted by the University of Miami at Jackson Memorial Hospital. The trial, using a patient’s own bone marrow stem cells, is the first intra-arterial stroke stem cell trial in the U.S., and the two patients at UM at Jackson are the first in Florida to participate. The trial, being led by Dileep Yavagal, assistant professor of neurology and neurological surgery, is examining the efficacy of ALD-401, derived from bone marrow and manufactured by Aldagen, to repair and regenerate tissue following an ischemic event.

HIV Discovery

Left untreated, HIV almost always progresses to AIDS in humans. Yet about one in 300 HIV-infected people control the virus after an initial burst of viral replication, even without medications. The mystery of how these individuals, known as “elite controllers,” suppress the rapidly adapting virus is answered in a seminal study published in the journal Nature. David I. Watkins, professor of pathology, and his team discovered that elite controllers generate a “killer cell” CD8+ T response against a few small regions of the virus, successfully controlling it. Watkins adds that understanding this mechanism may shed light on how to develop an effective HIV/AIDS vaccine. He and colleagues in Brazil are working on a vaccine with support from a $10 million National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases grant.

The post R+D Update appeared first on University of Miami: Miami Magazine.

From left, National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities director John Ruffin; José Szapocznik, A.B. ’69, M.S. ’73, Ph.D. ’77; and Norma Kenyon, UM vice provost for innovation and Miller School of Medicine chief innovation officer, at the Miami CTSI’s inaugural research forum on obesity in February Photo by Jorge R. Perez

A $20 million National Institutes of Health grant has enabled the University of Miami to establish the Miami Clinical and Translational Science Institute in order to improve health outcomes in South Florida and beyond.

Allocated over five years, the prestigious Clinical and Translational Science Award places the University in an elite research consortium of 60 institutions charged with speeding the translation of biomedical discoveries into therapies, engaging communities in clinical research, and training new researchers to be better prepared to resolve complex health problems facing an increasingly diverse nation.

Led by José Szapocznik, A.B. ’69, M.S. ’73, Ph.D. ’77, chair of Epidemiology and Public Health at the Miller School of Medicine, the Miami CTSI spans all UM campuses. Its community advisory board is co-chaired by President Donna E. Shalala and Health Council of South Florida president and CEO Marisel Losa.

Ranked No. 38, the Miller School is Florida’s only Top 40 institution in the Blue Ridge Institute for Medical Research’s national NIH funding rankings.

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Citizen ’Cane

Studying Creepy Crawlers to Save Lives

Insects will always be one spindly-legged step ahead of us, says Adriana Troyo Rodríguez, Ph.D. ’07, who’s been a fanatic follower of arthropods for as long as she can recall.

As a bug-obsessed child, she collected beetles, spiders, grasshoppers—whatever she could get her hands on in her native Costa Rica. “I even learned I had to give caterpillars the same plant they were feeding on when I collected them or they would not eat,” says Troyo Rodríguez, an associate professor of microbiology at the Universidad de Costa Rica in San Jose.

In 2010, at age 33, she was the first woman to be named Most Distinguished Scientist of the Year by Costa Rica’s Ministry of Science and Technology. The prize recognizes her achievements in researching Chagas disease, dengue fever, and other insect-borne tropical diseases.

After training with professors John C. Beier and Douglas O. Fuller in the College of Arts and Sciences’ interdisciplinary Ph.D. program, Troyo Rodríguez was involved in one of the world’s first efforts to study dengue epidemiology and Aedes aegypti ecology using high-resolution satellite imagery—a method that’s helping to predict outbreak times and locations.

“My latest scientific research is oriented toward understanding the epidemiology of rickettsial diseases such as typhus or spotted fevers, many of which are emerging tick-or flea-borne infections that can be fatal,” she says.

In addition to teaching, publishing research, and training health officials, Troyo Rodríguez’s days still revolve around collecting bugs. She travels door to door with her research team, taking blood, flea, and tick samples from dogs and other domestic pets. Her team also treks through forests to catch ectoparasites found on wild rodents and opossums.

“We begin the day with our rubber boots on at 7 a.m. and finish when the sun goes down, looking like we rolled in the mud with the animals—which we probably did,” she says.

The work is hard, sometimes dangerous, and ultimately lifesaving. “One of the most fulfilling aspects of my job,” says Troyo Rodríguez, “is knowing I can make a difference in my own country on topics where scientific research is very limited, but where we have much to give.”

—Robin Shear

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Citizen ’Cane

Rocking the Red Planet

Photo by NASA / JPL Caltech

From her undergraduate days studying mechanical and aerospace engineering in Miami through her master’s degree projects at M.I.T., Missouri-raised Erisa K. Hines, B.S.M.E. ’02, dreamed of exploring space.

That opportunity arose in 2006, when she was hired by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech. Just five years later she was working on the agency’s largest Mars rover yet, Curiosity.

Hines, an attitude control systems engineer, was on the team tasked with keeping the spacecraft on target—aligned with Earth for communications and the sun for solar power. She developed commands to communicate with the spacecraft during its eight-and-a-half month, 354-million-mile cruise towards Mars.

Hines shared the spotlight with hundreds of other “blue shirts” in JPL’s Pasadena control room as they famously erupted in cheers and tears when the rover’s 13,000-mile-per-hour entry, descent, and landing phase (dubbed “seven minutes of terror”) ended seamlessly in the wee hours of August 5, 2012.

The surprise, Hines notes, was how smooth the landing was: “We did a few dress rehearsals and, each time, something went wrong. When the time came for the actual landing, it was flawless. The rover hit within 1.5 miles of the landing target, well within the success parameters.”

As keynote speaker at the 2012 College of Engineering Homecoming Breakfast, Hines said her own trajectory was guided by supportive family and mentors. “There are probably at least three professors in this room who remember me crying in their office during my first two years, while I was trying to figure out how engineering works,” she shared. By junior year, though, her advisor insisted that she apply to graduate school at M.I.T. “That’s how much he believed in me.”

Another mentor was her grandfather Robert H. Colledge, ’53, who died two weeks before the landing. “He was always proud of Erisa’s many accomplishments,” notes his widow, Barbara Colledge, B.Ed. ’59.

Now, with her cosmic career launched, Hines is on the surface mobility team, which includes simulated Martian terrain testing intended to help Curiosity scour the Red Planet for answers to vast questions. “Dream big,” urges Hines. “These moments are why we do what we do.”

—Annette Gallagher, B.S.C. ’94

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Miami Project begins FDA-approved Schwann cell trial for spinal cord injury patients

W. Dalton Dietrich, scientific director of The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis Photo by Donna Victor

Schwann Cells Courtesy Miller School of Medicine

With 27 years of promising research came new hope for the new year. In December doctors at The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis performed the first-ever Food and Drug Administration-approved Schwann cell transplantation on a patient with a recent spinal cord injury.

The procedure was performed by University of Miami doctors at Jackson Memorial Hospital five months after the FDA green-lighted its Phase 1 clinical trial designed to evaluate the safety and feasibility of transplanting human Schwann cells, which are found in the peripheral nervous system.

The Miami Project, a Center of Excellence at the Miller School of Medicine, will enroll eight participants with acute thoracic spinal cord injury in the trial, which is part of the Christine E. Lynn Clinical Trials Initiative. They will be followed for a year post-surgery and then monitored for four more years under a separate clinical protocol.

“This trial and these first patients in this trial specifically are extremely important to our mission of curing paralysis,” says neurosurgeon Barth Green, co-founder and chair of The Miami Project, and professor and chair of neurological surgery. “This achievement reaffirms that the tens of millions of dollars and the incalculable work hours were well invested in this first-of-a-kind human Schwann cell project.”

Allan Levi, professor of neurological surgery, orthopaedics, and rehabilitation, and James Guest, associate professor of neurological surgery, conducted the historic procedure several weeks after the patient’s Schwann cells were harvested from tissue obtained from a nerve in one leg and then grown for several weeks in a culturing facility.

W. Dalton Dietrich, scientific director of The Miami Project and professor of neurological surgery, neurology, and cell biology and anatomy, says the trial’s successful completion “will lay the critical foundation for future cell-based therapies to target spinal cord injuries.”

Miami Project: miamiproject.miami.edu/page.aspx?pid=1048

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