UC Science Today

With so little room for a diagnostic lab, what happens when an astronaut gets ill in space? And what if we could even prevent a medical issue from happening? In this interview excerpt, Matthew Coleman, a senior research scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory describes a revolutionary, small handheld diagnostic device that can work with three different sample streams. Have a listen:

Transcript:

"So, one of the problems for space exploration is that there's limited room to take a lot of equipment in a diagnostic laboratory with you, and have it on, say the Space Station, or as you move to explore someplace like Mars. And so what we've been working on, is developing a small handheld diagnostic device that's kind of revolutionary in the fact that it can work with different types of sample streams to do both analytical diagnostics of health, and do differential blood cell counts because combined, those two things can give you a lot of information about your current health status; if you're pre-symptomatic to something, or if you're developing somewhere along your progression to a diseased state.

So, in our case, we're actually working on three different sample types. Two are non-invasive. So one is saliva, and the other one is actually breath. So, small volatiles in breath, can actually diagnose something about whether you have diabetes. It's much like a breathalyzer that the police use to know if you've been drinking. We can measure those small molecules in your breath, but also breath has a liquid component. It's called breath condensate. And that breath condensate can have some of the same proteins you find in blood and in saliva, that can also be used to diagnose health. So we can find proteins that are related to cancer or cardiovascular disease, inflammation, and even infection within that condensate. So then the third sample we're looking at is blood, because blood is the clinical standard, which all the doctors use. When you go to the doctor, you know they always take a small tube of 3 ml. to 5 ml. of blood and they're going to count your blood cells and be able to relate that to, whether you have anemia, even if you possibly have cancer, and your general health status based on measuring protein biomarkers or proteins in your blood as well. Right?

So you get your HDL measurement, that's done through a diagnostic kit called an ELISA to measure some specific proteins in your blood. And so we're going to provide one single device that can measure all three of those sample streams, and tell you something about proteins, your blood differentials, and what's in your breath."

Related content:

https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/biodetection_space

https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/biodetection_device

Seven American cities have approved ballot measures in favor of soda taxes. Public health expert Kris Madsen of the University of California, Berkeley explains how smoking and a subsequent tobacco tax set the precedent for the more recent sugar-sweetened beverage taxes.

Transcript:

"I think the tax that we saw on tobacco is really similar to the tax that you know supporting for sugar-sweetened beverages. So smoking is a great precedent. And in fact, this is one of the reasons that we think about why sugar-sweetened beverages as opposed to kind of anything that's out there that might fall into a junk food category. What we don't have in the U.S., anymore, and this is good news, we don't have a problem with people needing empty calories. I mean there have been times when hunger has been so severe that it would have been great to feed even empty calories, just calories on the table, right. That's not a problem now. There are still people who are hungry, but the solution is not giving them empty calories. It's getting healthier food into the emergency food system, for example. So tobacco and the taxes on tobacco are a great analogy when we're just talking about something like sugar-sweetened beverages because it's a luxury. It's something that you should - you know the American Heart Association just came out with new recommendations for kids, no more than six teaspoons of added sugar a day, and that kids shouldn't have more than one sugar-sweetened beverage a week, right? That's a huge recommendation and they're acknowledging, look, it's a little bit like a luxury tax on alcohol or cigarettes. That's your choice that's fine, but clearly it should only happen occasionally. "

Listen to a related episode:

https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/soda_public_health

Ah, teenagers! A time often described as an emotional, hormone-laden roller-coaster ride. We chatted with UCLA's Dr. Adriana Galván, whose research focuses on adolescent brain development. Specifically, her work examines how changes in brain maturation during adolescence relate to adolescent behavior and decision-making.

In this excerpt, she describes one reason why adolescence is often fraught with emotion:

"There is probably an evolutionary reason for why teenagers are more emotional. One reason is that emotions help us connect with other people. And during adolescence, it's really important that we establish good relationships, or understand the social rules of interacting with others, of having romantic partners, and so the emotional reactivity helps adolescents in that regard. Emotions also serve as an important learning tool. So when you feel a particular emotion, you're more likely to remember the event. So if an event was aversive, then those emotions will help you steer clear of those in the future. If an event is positive, similarly, you will also remember that in a way that is emotionally-based and more likely to re-engage in that behavior again. That emotional sensitivity can be really good for adolescents, but you can imagine how sometimes that can get them into trouble if they engage in a behavior they find very rewarding and emotional, but yet that behavior may not be good for them in the long run."

There’s some good news about aging. Next week, we’ll be featuring a story about a UC San Diego study, which found that despite physical ailments, older adults seem to consistently get happier over time. We interviewed Dr. Dilip Jeste about their work, which contradicts the conventional notions that aging is pretty much all ‘gloom and doom’. In this excerpt from our interview with Jeste, he describes what makes their study different.

“Usually, when people mention aging, they are thinking about physical aging, that's the only component that figures in ministries of aging, but aging is multidimensional. Physical health is one dimension. Another dimension is cognitive function, or cognitive health. So, that is what is being studied when we are looking at people with Alzheimer's Disease or other dementias. But the component of aging that is least studied is the psychosocial component of aging. In other words, what happens to the wellbeing, happiness, satisfaction, emotions, social activities, overall functioning? These things are not included in physical, and often in cognitive aspects of aging. So one of our goals was to look at all three components: physical, cognitive, and psychosocial, in the same study. So we got a much more comprehensive understanding of aging that many of the studies do.”

When there’s an outbreak of West Nile virus in California or dengue in Florida, county vector control districts will set up traps all over the place to capture mosquitoes and then test which were infected by the viruses in question.

"That’s how they are able to do surveillance work and figure out where they can concentrate their effort in cleaning up the mosquitoes."

That’s Anandasankar Ray, director of the Center for Disease Vector Research at the University of California, Riverside. Ray and his colleagues are using environmentally-friendly volatile molecules that can be formulated in little bottles to create affordable traps that can be set up in backyards for people to use.

"At the moment, the traps that are available in the market that are successful usually have a big tank of propane or butane that it burns. They’re quite expensive. And so we feel that by using volatile odors that are safe and that can mimic carbon dioxide, we may be able to create low-cost traps, affordable ones that can be used by vector control in developing countries as well."

For decades, researchers have been struggling to understand why some children develop asthma and allergies and some don't. Susan Lynch, a gastroenterologist at the University of California, San Francisco, has found that the microbes in a human gut may have some answers. While sampling newborn babies' stools, Lynch has discovered the same microbes that asthmatic adults have.

"And what we found is the children with highest risk type of microbiota they lacked a large range of bacteria and they include key organisms that we consider as biomarkers of healthy individuals. What we also found is that specific group that was at highest risk had quite a large expansion of two different types of fungi - rhodotorula and candida, and we know candida can be pro-allergic."

Lynch says that further studies of these microbes' effect on immune function may help prevent asthma and allergies.

One of the most important developments in science in the last couple of years has been engineering immune cells to fight cancer. But so far, the technique has not always been successful. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, are now trying to increase the power of immune white blood cells – called T-cells - to kill tumors. Molecular scientist Wendell Lim may have found a way.

"What we have been developing is a new ways of programming t-cells so we can actually flexibly change their behavior."

Lim says to achieve this, they have created microscopic robots that can move through the body and are now teaching them how to find cancer.

"We have developed a new type of sensor molecule called synthetic notch receptor that we can put in these T-cells and their receptors can be programed to recognize molecules that are unique to cancer."

The future of these molecules could not only help fight tumors, but also combat autoimmune diseases and other physical or mental disorders.

People who have lived in poverty through their youth and midlife – may be at greater risk of cognitive decline when they get older. That’s according to Kristine Yaffe, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco. Yaffe has been following a group of young adults from 18 to 30 years old, until they reached their 50s and discovered a warning pattern.

"What we found is those people who, most of the time, or some of the time were in the poverty range, or in hardship did slightly worse on the cognitive testing at midlife."

The researchers tested memory, organizational skills and brain processing speed and are now working on interpreting these results.

"Does this mean this is just the way people are and it’ll stay this way? Does this mean it’s the beginning of something that If that’s the case, Yaffe says catching early signs of cognitive decline is very important for prevention and treatment later on."

Language and memory are actually interconnected. For decades, linguists were ignoring this fact, studying these two brain functions separately. Robert Knight, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has discovered the connection - now wants to know just how much memory and language interact.

"One of our areas of research is defining the degree of that connectivity, how the brain rhythms in one area, the hippocampus, are coherent with brain rhythms in the language area. It's like two people dancing; are they in sync, right? Are they coherent?"

These new findings will help scientists open up a whole new area of study with intracranial recordings.

“We might be able to use it as an early diagnostic tool, but more importantly it would open up the possibility that we could stimulate the brain to restore the proper brain rhythm."

Knight says this study might also shed new light on diseases affecting language and memory - like autism, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.

It’s been another busy week for us here at Science Today. During a visit at the University of Calfornia, San Francisco, we learned that about 10 to 25 thousand cases of stroke, aneurysm or epilepsy may go undetected each year. Anthony Kim, director of UCSF’s Stroke Center has been studying misclassified cases of neurological death, which were erroneously thought to be sudden cardiac death.

"So, it has kind of implications on the public health estimates, it has implications on the interpretations of death outcomes, in large cardiovascular trials."

And it also has implications on diagnosis. And while on the subject of diagnosis – the rates of childhood asthma and allergies are on the rise in this country, so if you want to lessen your child’s risk, you may want to consider getting a dog. Susan Lynch, a gastroenterologist at UCSF made this connection while studying microbes in newborn babies’ bodies.

"Exposure in early life to a greater breadth of organisms seems to be beneficial and allows the system to accumulate a greater diversity of organisms, which really means a greater diversity of the microbial functions."

In other words, a mixture of home dust and a dog’s dander can help a child become immune to asthma later in life, especially if the pet is brought home when a child is no older than one month. And finally, we crossed the bridge into Berkeley to speak with a cognitive neuroscientist there, who has found that language and memory are actually interconnected. Robert Knight says for decades linguists were ignoring this fact and studying these two brain functions separately.

"One of our areas of research is defining the degree of that connectivity; how the brain rhythms in one area, the hippocampus, are coherent with brain rhythms in the language area, like two people dancing. Are they in synch, right? Are they coherent?"

To hear these and other episodes about the latest University of California research, tune into Science Today on iTunes or follow us on Soundcloud. Thanks for listening, I’m Larissa Branin.

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Stories mentioned in this roundup:

https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/stroke_detection

https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/kids_asthma

https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/language_memory