Neural Synaptic Vesicle Autoimmunity Following Aerosolized Porcine Neural Tissue Exposure - Part 2

In the final installment of this series, Dr. Justin Abbatemarco and Dr. Divyanshu Dubey discuss the latest findings and some non-occupational exposures. 

Show citation: 

Hinson SR, Gupta P, Paramasivan NK, et al. Neural synaptic vesicle autoimmunity following aerosolized porcine neural tissue exposure: insights into autoimmune inflammatory polyradiculoneuropathy. EBioMedicine. 2025;122:106053. doi:10.1016/j.ebiom.2025.106053

Show transcript: 

Dr. Justin Abbatemarco: 

Hello, and welcome back. This is Justin Abbatemarco. I'm here with Divyanshu Dubey, discussing his article, Neural Synaptic Vesicle Autoimmunity Following Aerosolized Porcine Neural Tissue Exposure: Insights Into Autoimmune Inflammatory Polyradiculoneuropathy.

Div, maybe we could talk about non-occupational exposures? I think many of us don't see this cohort of patients commonly, but I really think this helps inform care, beyond just this specific occupational exposure. What did you guys find in your work?

Dr. Divyanshu Dubey: 

So, one of the inspirations for this study was driven by the phenotypic characterization of patients who were described in this 2010 paper, which is somewhat similar to some of the patients I currently see in my clinic who don't seem to meet GBS or CIDP criteria. But, based on their MRI findings, based on their CSF studies, the EMG nerve conduction studies, they seem to have this polyradiculoneuropathy presentation, often presenting with asymmetric disease onsets, starting on one leg and then sometimes transitioning to the other side.

In some cases, even a non-length dependent pattern with sort of proximal cervical brachial nerve root plexus involvements, which don't really seem to have a blood test, or a biomarker right now. Currently, many of these cases are a diagnosis of exclusion. I was thinking if there's a biomarker that we can identify from this 2006 to 2008 unfortunate event, that might actually help us diagnose these patients.

So, once we identified synaptophysin and GAP43 antibodies in the swine abattoir cohort, I went back to our storages of these patients with other inflammatory polyradiculoneuropathy, and found about 5% of these patients from a large cohort of close to 300 patients, did have these antibody biomarkers.

Some of these patients had paraneoplastic trigger, where we had patients with neuroendocrine tumors, or hematological malignancies mounting a response to these antibodies. But a good chunk of these patients we did not truly understand, or know what the triggers were. That might be a potential for future studies, as we expand our cohort of these antibodies, as well as study further the phenotypic characterization of these cases.

Dr. Justin Abbatemarco:

Yeah, there's just so much there, really helping to inform future clinical care outside of this very specific occupational exposure. And then, as we talked about in the podcast, I think really helping to think through how neurological autoimmune diseases develop. So, just really exciting work.

We really appreciate you coming on, sharing this. We're excited for how this evolves over the coming years.

Dr. Divyanshu Dubey: 

Thank you, Justin.