Depression

It’s all about the patients

/ Kevin McCormack / 2 Comments
Ronnie, born with a fatal immune disorder now leading a normal life thanks to a CIRM-funded stem cell/gene therapy: Photo courtesy of his mum Upasana

Whenever you are designing something new you always have to keep in mind who the end user is. You can make something that works perfectly fine for you, but if it doesn’t work for the end user, the people who are going to work with it day in and day out, you have been wasting your time. And their time too.

At CIRM our end users are the patients. Everything we do is about them. Starting with our mission statement: to accelerate stem cell treatments to patients with unmet medical needs. Everything we do, every decision we make, has to keep the needs of the patient in mind.

So, when we were planning our recent 2020 Grantee Meeting (with our great friends and co-hosts UC Irvine and UC San Diego) one of the things we wanted to make sure didn’t get lost in the mix was the face and the voice of the patients. Often big conferences like this are heavy on science with presentations from some of the leading researchers in the field. And we obviously wanted to make sure we had that element at the Grantee meeting. But we also wanted to make sure that the patient experience was front and center.

And we did just that. But more on that in a minute. First, let’s talk about why the voice of the patient is important.

Some years ago, Dr. David Higgins, a CIRM Board member and patient advocate for Parkinson’s Disease (PD), said that when researchers are talking about finding treatments for PD they often focus on the dyskinesia, the trembling and shaking and muscle problems. However, he said if you actually asked people with PD you’d find they were more concerned with other aspects of the disease, the insomnia, anxiety and depression among other things. The key is you have to ask.

Frances Saldana, a patient advocate for research into Huntington’s disease

So, we asked some of our patient advocates if they would be willing to be part of the Grantee Meeting. All of them, without hesitation, said yes. They included Frances Saldana, a mother who lost three of her children to Huntington’s disease; Kristin MacDonald, who lost her sight to a rare disorder but regained some vision thanks to a stem cell therapy and is hoping the same therapy will help restore some more; Pawash Priyank, whose son Ronnie was born with a fatal immune disorder but who, thanks to a stem cell/gene therapy treatment, is now healthy and leading a normal life.

Because of the pandemic everything was virtual, but it was no less compelling for that. We interviewed each of the patients or patient advocates beforehand and those videos kicked off each session. Hearing, and seeing, the patients and patient advocates tell their stories set the scene for what followed. It meant that the research the scientists talked about took on added significance. We now had faces and names to highlight the importance of the work the scientists were doing. We had human stories. And that gave a sense of urgency to the work the researchers were doing.

But that wasn’t all. After all the video presentations each session ended with a “live” panel discussion. And again, the patients and patient advocates were a key part of that. Because when scientists talk about taking their work into a clinical trial they need to know if the way they are setting up the trial is going to work for the patients they’re hoping to recruit. You can have the best scientists, the most promising therapy, but if you don’t design a clinical trial in a way that makes it easy for patients to be part of it you won’t be able to recruit or retain the people you need to test the therapy.

Patient voices count. Patient stories count.

But more than anything, hearing and seeing the people we are trying to help reminds us why we do this work. It’s so easy to get caught up in the day to day business of our jobs, struggling to get an experiment to work, racing to get a grant application in before the deadline. Sometimes we get so caught up in the minutiae of work we lose sight of why we are doing it. Or who we are doing it for.

At CIRM we have a saying; come to work every day as if lives depend on you, because lives depend on you. Listening to the voices of patients, seeing their faces, hearing their stories, reminds us not to waste a moment. Because lives depend on all of us.

Here’s one of the interviews that was featured at the event. I do apologize in advance for the interviewer, he’s rubbish at his job.

The challenges of living with IPEX

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment

Last week the CIRM Board awarded $5.53 million to Dr. Rosa Bacchetta at Stanford to complete the work necessary to conduct a clinical trial for IPEX syndrome. This is a rare disease caused by mutations in the FOXP3 gene which leaves people with the condition vulnerable to immune system attacks on their organs and tissues. These attacks can be devastating, even fatal.

At the Board meeting Taylor Lookofsky, a young man with IPEX syndrome, talked about the impact the condition has had on his life. The transcript of his talk is below.

It’s a powerful reminder that syndromes like this, because they affect a small number of people, are often overlooked and have few resources devoted to finding new treatments and cures. After reading Taylor’s story you come to appreciate his courage and determination, and why the funding CIRM provides is so important in helping researchers like Dr. Bacchetta find therapies to help people like Taylor.

Brian Lookofsky (Taylor’s father), Taylor Lookofsky and Dr. Rosa Bacchetta at the CIRM Board meeting

“Good morning, my name is Taylor Lookofsky and I would first like to thank Rosa, who is one of the many doctors in my life. Rosa presented me with this amazing opportunity to come and speak to you today about my life and the challenges living with IPEX.

  • I’d like to give you some background into my health challenges I’ve faced my entire life. Now to give some context to my years of struggle, I am 28 years old, not 10 years younger as some may have assumed.
  • My first diagnosis came at the age of 1 ½ years old -type 1 diabetes.
  • Soon after being diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, I had to have a feeding tube inserted in my abdomen as I was restricted from eating almost all foods due to unknown food allergies. I was not allowed to ingest ANY food until the age of 6 years old. When I was finally introduced to food, any food ingested was tasteless and felt like sandpaper on my tongue since I had to train myself to eat.
  • Around age 10, I would be faced with the beginning of a never-ending battle with my dermatitis. I remember specific details where my mother had taken me to a dermatologist to try and figure out what was happening to my skin as it was red, blotchy, oozing. I remember shivering so badly that my mom had to ask the doctor’s office to turn the air down.
  • At age 18 I had been formally diagnosed with IPEX. I lost my hair and my skin started a battle that was more intense than any previous episode. I remember taking showers and clumps of my hair would fall out, and I would cry in the shower not knowing what was going on.
  • At age 20, I would go through the most horrific episode with my skin to date. I was bed ridden, on pain meds and could not sleep. I had gone to all of my doctors trying to figure out what had triggered this event, and no doctor could figure out what was happening, leaving me extremely frustrated, depressed and drained of all energy. I went to the burn center as a last resort and was then treated like a burn patient. To care for these wounds, I would bathe, take a sponge and physically scrape these wounds to keep them infection free and as clean as possible. When I would exit the bath, I felt like a dried-up sponge and my skin was so tight that any movement would make my skin crack open and start bleeding. To add to this, I had to use medicated wraps to help with the healing process.
  • In an ongoing attempt to treat my many symptoms, I took a series of medications that came with side effects. I have had at least 15 surgeries to remove squamous cells caused by one of the medications: In 2018, my colon perforated. As a result, I now have a colostomy bag.

The IPEX symptoms have affected me not just physically, but mentally as well. I had lost all my hair and growth has been permanently stunted, and I have not reached the point in puberty as my male counterparts. I would go day by day and see all my peers and be envious that they were tall, had beards and hair, had relationships, and the confidence that I was lacking and admittedly, still lack to this day at times.

I’ve felt hopeless because there have been so few treatment options and with the treatment currently available, I have tried hundreds of medications and creams, and have had my blood drawn countless times in hopes of finding a medication that works for me, or a cure for this insufferable disease. However, nothing. As a result, I have been battling depression singe age 20. There were days that went by where I thought “I just don’t want to be here if this is what life is going to be like.” 

The funding needed for Dr. Rosa’s therapy would be life changing in the way of new treatment options and potentially lead to a cure for this horrific disease.

I am determined to see that there is so much more to life than what society is telling me. I’ve decided that I would not conform to societies rules, and instead, tell society how I am going to live my unique and authentic life with IPEX.

I appreciate your time and consideration to fund this important research.”

Measuring depression with non-invasive imaging of new brain cells

/ Todd Dubnicoff / Leave a comment

For most of the 20th century, scientists thought you’re basically stuck with the brain cells you’re born with. “Everything may die, nothing may be regenerated”, is how Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, described nerve cells, aka neurons, in the adult brain. But, over the past few decades, it’s become clear that stem cells are present in the brain and produce new neurons over the course of our lives.

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Hippocampus (in red)
Image: Life Science Databases

This better understanding of brain biology opened up new insights into brain function. For instance, a reduced volume of the hippocampus, an area of the brain important for learning and memory, is linked to depression and the use of anti-depressant drugs like Prozac have been shown to trigger the growth of new neurons in this part of the brain.

Now, researchers at the RIKEN institute in Japan have developed a non-invasive imaging method – so far, just in rats – to track the generation of new neurons from brain stem cells.  This study, reported in the Journal of Neuroscience, may provide new means to diagnose depression and to monitor the effectiveness of drugs in ways that aren’t currently possible.

A PET project to track new brain cells

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PET scan of human brain
Image: Wikipedia

The scientists focused on the use of positron emitting tomography (PET) imaging, which involves the injecting a radioactive tracer, designed to target an organ or a specific area of an organ, into the blood. The use of this type of tracer is routine in medical imaging and the radioactivity decays so fast that it’s essentially gone within 24 hours. The radioactive signal that’s emitted out from the body is then detected with PET scanning and reveals the precise location of the tracer within the body or organ. But PET scanning of neurogenesis in the brain had proved to be difficult – no definitive signals were observed. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is also a no-go because it requires the risky injection of a tracer directly into the brain.

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PET scanner. Image: Jacoby Werther

The RIKEN team pinpointed the stumbling block: the lack of signal was due to the presence of proteins, called drug transporters, that continually pump the radioactive tracers out of the brain and back into the blood. When they re-ran the PET scan using a clinically available drug that blocks the transporter proteins, a neurogenesis signal was picked up.

Prozac helps stimulate new brain cell growth
With this obstacle overcome, the team tested out their technique. They gave one group of rats corticosterone, a stress hormone, for a month. This hormone is known to reduce neurogenesis and create depression-like behavior in the animals. They gave a second group of rats corticosterone plus Prozac. Sure enough, the PET scan signal was able to measure a decrease in neurogenesis in the corticosterone only group but also a recovery in neurogenesis in the group that received the hormone plus Prozac. Follow up analysis of rat brain slices confirmed that compared to untreated animals, neurogenesis was reduced 45% in the corticosterone group but no reduction was observed when Prozac was also included.

In a news release picked up by Nanowerk, team lead Yosky Kataoka discussed the game-changer possibilities of their new method:

“This is a very interesting finding because it has been a long-time dream to find a noninvasive test that can give objective evidence of depression and simultaneously show whether drugs are working in a given patient. We have shown that it is possible, at least in experimental animals, to use PET to show the presence of depression and the effectiveness of drugs… Since it is known that these same brain regions are involved in depression in the human brain, we would like to try this technique in the clinic and see whether it turns out to be effective in humans as well.”