Tag: university of washington
Heart Muscle Successfully Regenerated In Monkeys From Stem Cells

Heart Muscle Successfully Regenerated In Monkeys From Stem Cells

By Carol M. Ostrom, The Seattle Times

SEATTLE — Since 1996, Dr. Chuck Murry, a University of Washington cardiovascular biology researcher, has been intent on transforming powerful human stem cells into heart-muscle cells that can repair damaged hearts.

Over the years, he and his colleagues have worked through myriad setbacks and complications in studies on mice, rats and guinea pigs, piling up successes as their animal models got larger and physiologically closer to humans.

Now, they have successfully regenerated heart muscle in monkeys, Murry and Dr. Michael Laflamme and other colleagues at the UW Institute for Stem Cell & Regenerative Medicine reported in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

As before, the researchers transformed the human stem cells into heart-muscle cells, this time injecting them into damaged monkey hearts. There, the cells assembled themselves into muscle fibers, began beating in the heart’s rhythm, and ultimately were nurtured by the monkey’s arteries and veins, which grew into the new heart tissue.

“This is 10 times more heart muscle than anybody else in the world has been able to generate,” said Murry, who predicted his lab would be ready for clinical trials in humans within four years.

Dr. Michael Simons, director of the Yale Cardiovascular Research Center, said the research is the first to show that human embryonic stem cells can fully integrate into normal heart tissue. The lab’s impressive “scale up” for production of sufficient newly programmed stem cells for a large-animal heart, which was done by Laflamme’s team, was likely unprecedented, as well.

The Murry team’s latest success, like the others, did not answer every question and had its own complications, but even so, cardiovascular research leaders not connected with the work hailed it as a significant step forward.

“It’s a very big deal,” said Dr. Richard Lee of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. It’s very challenging to do such experiments, and being able to show benefit is a “real achievement,” he said.

Murry is “an extraordinarily careful and thoughtful investigator,” Lee added. “When work comes out of his lab it makes us all feel better because we know we can trust it.”

The most serious problem encountered in the research was a period of irregular heartbeats, known as arrhythmias. Although the monkeys’ arrhythmias disappeared after a few weeks, Murry and others said it was concerning.” That’s a very big deal, because that’s what kills,” Simons said. On the other hand, he said, the arrhythmias were not unexpected because of technical issues with larger hearts.

“The question is: How serious are they? How long do they last? Do they go away after several weeks after the tissue matures and the heart matures, or is it a lifelong problem?”

Murry said if his lab hadn’t been monitoring the monkeys 24-7, researchers might have missed the arrhythmias, which didn’t appear to have disturbed the monkeys.

“The monkey is in the cage eating a banana,” Murry said. Meanwhile, “the investigators are freaking out. We’re having the heart attack. But the monkey was OK.”

The six monkeys involved in the study were pigtail macaques, a type commonly used in research.

Heart muscle is inextricably linked to heart failure, which for Murry is Public Enemy No. 1, with worse average survival time than breast cancer, he said.

When a heart attack damages heart muscle, it forms scar tissue rather than growing back. If there is enough damage, the heart may not have enough muscle to pump out blood, leading to heart failure, which Murry calls “a burgeoning public-health problem.”

“It’s really bad now, and it’s going to get worse” as the baby boomer generation ages, he said.

For Murry, his lab’s latest success is bittersweet. His mother, Donna Murry — the inspiration and motivation for his focus on fixing damaged hearts, he said — died last week of multiple infarctions. Heart disease ran in her family, Murry said.” She is the kind of person we would like to have helped,” he said. “My mom would have been so proud.”

UC Irvine via Flickr

Expert Baffled By Ferocity, Distance Of ‘Freakish’ Landslide

Expert Baffled By Ferocity, Distance Of ‘Freakish’ Landslide

By Sandi Doughton, The Seattle Times

SEATTLE — Richard Iverson may be one of the world’s foremost landslide experts, but if he had been driving along the Stillaguamish River March 22 when the slope across from Steelhead Drive began to crumble, he wouldn’t have fled to high ground.

He would have pulled over to snap pictures.

That’s because Iverson never dreamed a slide from such a modest bluff could travel as far and as fast as it did, sweeping across the river, burying an entire neighborhood and engulfing a swath of Highway 530 in a minute’s time.

“It was a freakish thing,” said Iverson, of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Cascades Volcano Observatory. “I’m not sure anybody would have anticipated a slope like that would liquefy the way it did.”

Using a new computer model, Iverson estimated that the mass of mud, rocks and trees was traveling about 60 mph when it slammed into the river.

Imagine standing on the side of a freeway when a semi-truck barrels past at 60 mph, Iverson said. Then imagine a battalion of eighteen-wheelers, half a mile wide, headed straight at you.

“It’s hard for me to imagine somebody being in the middle of that Steelhead neighborhood and having any chance of survival,” he said.

Snohomish County officials have reported 35 people dead and an additional 10 missing.

An eyewitness Iverson spoke with described the slide literally shoving the river out of its banks.

Iverson spent several days at the site last week and is compiling the first scientific report on what he believes will be a “profoundly important” event in the understanding of landslide hazards.

When the recovery effort is over, he and other scientists hope to study the slide in detail, trying to figure out why it so quickly liquefied and ran out for nearly a mile — more than three times the distance Iverson would have expected based on comparison with hundreds of other slides of similar heights.

“This bluff is only about 180 meters (about 600 feet) tall, which by Northwest standards is sort of small potatoes,” Iverson said.

The hope is that by understanding what caused the slide to morph into a monster, scientists will be able to better identify the most dangerous hazard zones in the future, said Jonathan Godt, a Denver-based USGS expert who also visited the Oso slide.

“It’s one of these tragic events that unfortunately provides an opportunity to increase awareness,” he said.

While it’s fairly easy to identify landslide-prone slopes, it’s much harder to predict how far slides will travel, said University of Washington geomorphologist David Montgomery. Geologists who analyzed slide risks along the North Fork of the Stillaguamish warned in 1999 that a “large catastrophic failure” was possible. But in the worst-case scenario they deemed most likely, the runout was estimated at less than a quarter of a mile.

“Any geologist who went out there would say, yes, this situation is ripe for a landslide,” Iverson said. “But in my mind, the story isn’t that a landslide occurred, but the type of landslide that occurred.”

He blames the disaster on a combination of unusually wet weather, erosion at the toe of the slide and local geology.

The slope that failed is largely made up of loose, sandy soil deposited by retreating glaciers. But that porous material is underlain by a compacted layer of silt and clay, which blocks the flow of water and allows it to accumulate deep within the hillside.

The slide may have started at that clay layer, Iverson said, but more field work is needed to be sure.

He believes the first block of soil to start moving was the jumbled pile of debris at the foot of the slope from a previous slide in 2006. The movement of that chunk destabilized the upper slope, which then collapsed.

The witness, who was in his yard across the valley, said the first thing he noticed was his dogs running away. “They probably either heard it or felt it first,” Iverson said. Then the man heard a loud roar and saw the river being flung into the air as the debris raced across the landscape.

“In my view, the thing liquefied very quickly after beginning to move,” Iverson said.

As the sandy slope collapsed, the weight probably compressed the sodden soil, which would have increased water pressure between soil grains and turned the mass to soup.

A similar effect could have occurred as the slide thundered across the low ground of the Steelhead Drive neighborhood, squeezing the saturated soil like a sponge, Iverson said.

Marcus Yam/Seattle Times/MCT

Justice Sotomayor Shares Supreme Life Lessons

Justice Sotomayor Shares Supreme Life Lessons

By Katherine Long, The Seattle Times

SEATTLE — Saying she was reluctant to give advice to 20-somethings because they probably wouldn’t listen, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor offered it anyway to a packed crowd of 1,200 at the University of Washington last week.

Candid and funny, Sotomayor talked about how hard it can be to arrive at a decision as a court justice, hinted at her distaste for the way money drives politics, agreed that the Supreme Court is probably still “the most moral institution” of government and offered advice about dealing with prejudice and stereotypes.

When she was done, she waded into the crowd and posed for photos with groups of grinning students, although she acknowledged that doing so would probably drive her security officers crazy.

Her appearance at the university’s Husky Union Building ballroom March 10 was part of a book tour for “My Beloved World,” her 2010 autobiography about growing up in the Bronx, the daughter of poor immigrant Puerto Rican parents. She was scheduled to speak later in the evening at Town Hall Seattle.

University of Washington Provost Ana Mari Cauce asked the questions, which had been submitted earlier by students. Sotomayor surprised the audience by asking each questioner to stand up and be recognized before she gave her answer, making the interview seem less formal and more personal.

Dressed in a crimson jacket, cream-colored blouse and black skirt, Sotomayor was hobbling a little from what she described as a knee injury.

She told students to sample lots of different fields, but to settle on the work they found most meaningful.

“The work you do the best is the work you love,” she said. “The greatest contribution you can make is figuring out what you think is important to you, what kind of work will satisfy you, what kind of work will make you feel meaningful, what kind of work will make a contribution to improving something that you think is significant.”

She told students to develop a community of good friends but also seek out people from different backgrounds and take classes in unfamiliar subjects.

Sotomayor said she regretted not asking more questions of her college friends while she was still in school, which would have helped her understand more about their lives.

One student asked what barriers still needed to be broken to improve the representation of women and minorities in government.

“Money,” Sotomayor said to laughter. “No, seriously. Look at what’s happening in politics. What’s talking the loudest is money.” For more minorities and women to gain more of a foothold in government decisions, “we’re going to have to work the political system at the highest level,” she said.

The first Latina to be appointed to the Supreme Court, Sotomayor talked of the hurt she felt during her confirmation hearings, when skeptics questioned whether she was smart enough to be a Supreme Court justice. And she also described an incident from her childhood, when the father of one of her friends used a racial epithet to describe Puerto Ricans while she was in the room.

“I don’t let others judge me — I judge me,” Sotomayor said.

Of the others, she said, “frankly, to hell with them.”

Sotomayor told the students that it was important to “find someone in your life who unconditionally loves you,” and that her grandmother was that person. “What gave me my drive is my mother,” she added.

What are you optimistic about? one student wanted to know. Said Sotomayor: “I’m very optimistic about the power of minorities to change the dialogue in this country.”

At the end of the talk, Sotomayor offered to pose for group pictures with students, prompting Cauce to say, “You really are Sonia from the Bronx.”

Photo: Commonwealth.club via Flickr