Discover CircRes Intro Podcast

Cindy S.H.:                        

Hi. Welcome to Discover CircRes, the monthly podcast of the American Heart Association's journal Circulation Research. I'm your host, Cindy St. Hilaire, and my goal is to bring you highlights of articles published in the Circ Research Journal as well as have in-depth conversations with senior scientists and the junior trainees who have led the most exciting discoveries in our current issues. Today is our premier episode, so I want to take some time to introduce myself, give you a little bit of background about the history of the journal, and then have a conversation with our new editor in chief, Dr. Jane Freedman, and my social media editor partner in crime, Dr. Milka Koupenova.

Cindy S.H.:                        

First, a little bit about me. I'm an assistant professor of medicine and bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh. My lab is part of the division of cardiology and we're also a member of the Pittsburgh Heart, Lung and Blood Vascular Medicine Institute. I'm still a relatively new PI. I'm still learning as I go. One of the strengths of being a new PI in the current time is the amazing network we have through social media, whether it's through listening to podcasts or through Twitter or through select groups like one of my favorites, New PI Slack. Really one of my personal goals of starting this podcast for Circ Research is to have a career development angle. Because career development is so fresh in my mind and it's really something I want to incorporate into this podcast, we're hoping we can reach out to more junior trainees through these mediums. Really that's the impetus for Dr. Freedman wanting to have specific social media editors at the Circulation Research Journal.

Cindy S.H.:                        

I'm very honored to be the first host of this podcast and I'm very excited for this opportunity. As a team, Milka and I hope to expose the larger community to not only the most current and exciting discoveries in cardiovascular research but also a behind-the-scenes look of what it takes to get high-impact research done and published and planned and funded, and also talk about some of the maybe the non-bench aspects of this job, the networking, the behind-the-scenes look that really you learn on the fly as you go. Hopefully we can expose more people to these on-the-fly things in a slightly more rigorous manner.

Cindy S.H.:                        

Before I go into the articles summarized in this week's podcast, I want to give a very big thank you to Ruth Williams. Ruth is the person who writes the content of the In This Issue which is featured in every issue of the journal Circulation Research, and that content is extremely helpful in deciding which articles we're going to focus on in this podcast and also for helping me form the conversations and discussions. Thank you, Ruth, for all your hard work.

Cindy S.H.:                        

Now I'm going to highlight three articles that were featured in the June 21st issue of Circulation Research. The first is entitled Relationship Between Serum Alpha-Tocopherol and Overall and Cause-Specific Mortality: A 30-Year Prospective Cohort Analysis. The first author is Jiaqi Huang and the corresponding author is Demetrius Albanes , who are both at the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics at the National Cancer Institute, which is at the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland. Alpha-tocopherol is the more formal name for vitamin E, and vitamin E is an essential fat-soluble vitamin. By essential, that means that while your body absolutely needs it, it does not produce it itself. Therefore we need to consume products containing vitamin E. We do that by eating vegetable oils, nuts, seeds, whole grains and certain fruits and vegetables. Previously, population-based studies have shown inconsistent associations between circulating vitamin E and risk of overall death or death due to specific diseases such as cancer and cardiovascular disease.

Cindy S.H.:                        

To look more closely at cause-specific mortality, Huang and colleagues studied a cohort of close to 30,000 Finnish men, which is a huge study. Added to that, these men were in their 50s and 60s at the start of the study and then continued for the next 30 years of their life to be in this study. It's frankly an amazing achievement to keep that many individuals enrolled. From approximately 24,000 deaths, so about 80% of the original cohort, the authors adjusted for factors such as age and confounding things like smoking. They found that vitamin E levels were inversely associated with the risk of death from a variety of causes. What that means is that higher levels of vitamin E associated with lower risk of death. All of those causes of death that they found were cardiovascular disease, heart disease, stroke, cancer, and respiratory disease. This large prospective cohort analysis provides very strong evidence that higher vitamin E levels means greater protection.

Cindy S.H.:                        

It's really interesting to note though that this data did not seem to associate with a reduced risk of death by diabetes or, for that matter, injury and accidents, which I guess kind of makes sense. The authors say these results indicate that vitamin E may influence longevity, but they also highlight the need for further studies, specifically in more ethnically diverse populations and of course in women, because we all know a major limiting factor of a majority of cardiovascular studies is the fact that often there are just not enough women in these studies. But really that's a push now to include not only women but more ethnically and geographically diverse populations.

Cindy S.H.:                        

The second article I want to highlight is titled Mitochondria Are a subset of Extracellular Vesicles Released by Activated Monocytes and Induce Type I IFN and TNF Responses in Endothelial Cells . The first authors are Florian Puhm and Taras Afonyushkin , and the senior author is Christopher Binder. All three are in the Department of Laboratory Medicine, the Medical University of Vienna, in Vienna, Austria. This group is also part of the Research Center of Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Cindy S.H.:                        

I want to talk about this paper because I found that title extremely provocative. Extracellular vesicles or microvesicles are small particles that can be released from cells. These particles can act as cell-cell communicators. They can hold a variety of substances such as proteins and micro RNAs and minerals and all sorts of things that are derived from inside the cell. The matrix vesicle is then budded off. Matrix vesicles released from monocytes after bacterial LPS stimulation, so a stimulus that induces an inflammatory response, these matrix vesicles have been shown to contain mitochondrial proteins. Mitochondrial DNA-containing matrix vesicles have been reported in the mouse model of inflammation. From this premise, from these prior studies, Dr. Puhm and colleagues hypothesized that the mitochondrial content of matrix vesicles might actively contribute to pro-inflammatory effects.

Cindy S.H.:                        

What they then did was show that monocytic cells release free mitochondria and also matrix vesicles that contain mitochondria within them. These free and matrix vesicle-encapsulated mitochondria were shown to drive enothelial cells to induce inflammatory cytokines such as TNF-alpha and interferon. These circulating matrix vesicles were collected also in human volunteers that were injected with this same inflammatory substance, LPS. These circulating matrix vesicles isolated from humans also induced endothelial cell cytokine production. Very interestingly, inhibition of the mitochondrial activity drastically reduced the pro-inflammatory capacity of these matrix vesicles.

Cindy S.H.:                        

Together, this result suggests that the released mitochondria, whether it's free or whether it's encapsulated in a matrix vesicle, may be a key player in certain inflammatory diseases. This study shows that in addition to their central role in cellular metabolism, mitochondria, whether encapsulated or free, can actively participate in an inflammatory response in a cell other than the cell it was native in, which is just intriguing to think about. This work provides new insight to the contribution of mitochondria to the content and biological activity of extracellular vesicles. It also might suggest that perhaps targeting mitochondria and their release may represent a novel point for therapeutic intervention in inflammatory pathologies.

Cindy S.H.:                        

The last article I want to highlight is titled Macrophage Smad3 Protects the Infarcted Heart, Stimulating Phagocytosis and Regulating Inflammation . The first author is Bijun Chen and the senior author is Nikolaos Frangogiannis . When tissues are injured, there is localized increase in the cytokine TGF-beta. However, depending on conditions, this TGF-beta can function to stimulate macrophages to adopt either pro-inflammatory or anti-inflammatory phenotypes. To complicate matters more, the signaling pathway for both the pro- and anti-inflammatory phenotypes involves activation of the intracellular signaling protein Smad3. Inflammation, whether too much or too little, can influence the outcome of injuries, including injuries such as myocardial infarctions. An infarction, for those of you unfamiliar with the term, is a localized area of dead tissue and that results from a lack of blood supply. In this case, an infarction, a myocardial infarction, is essentially a heart attack that stops blood flow through the coronaries and causes death in the cardiac tissue and cells.

Cindy S.H.:                        

The authors hypothesized that in the infarcted myocardium, activation of TGF-beta and Smad signaling and macrophages may regulate repair and remodeling. They had a very specific question about a very specific cell type in the context of the whole heart. To address the role of Smad3, they utilized mice that were engineered to lack Smad3 in the myeloid lineage which produces macrophage cells. They found that these mice with myeloid cell-specific deletion of Smad3 had reduced survival compared to control mice. Additionally, the hearts from the animals with the myeloid cell-specific deletion of Smad3 exhibited increased adverse remodeling and greater impairment of function. That's a really interesting finding. The heart tissue itself was the same. All that was different were the cells of the myeloid lineage. Then to dig after what cells were mediating this effect, the investigators moved on to in vitro studies. They found that Smad3-lacking cells themselves showed reduced phagocytic activity, sustained expression of pro-inflammatory genes, and reduced production of anti-inflammatory mediators when compared with control macrophages.

Cindy S.H.:                        

In summary, these results suggest Smad3 is necessary for macrophages in the area of the infarction to transition to an anti-inflammatory phagocytic phenotype that protects against excess remodeling. However, we cannot go after global inhibition of Smad3 as a potential therapy post myocardial infarction, and that's because inhibition of Smad3 in cardiomyocytes is actually protective against the infarction. Inhibition in a macrophage is bad, but inhibition in a cardiomyocyte is good. Any potential Smad3-modifying therapies really needs to be designed to be cell type-specific and be able to be deployed to activate that cell type.

Cindy S.H.:                        

In addition to science, I love history. I thought I would take this opportunity of the first podcast to share with you a little bit of history about the Journal of Circulation Research. Circulation Research is now in its 66th year, but its origins can be traced to 1944. That was when the AHA established a council that was attempting to organize its research arm and its professional program arms. The AHA journal Circulation was already in existence, but in 1951 the executive committee decided to launch a basic research supplement, and it was called just that: Circulation Basic Research Supplement. But a few years later, Circulation Research was to be its own publication because of the interest and the excitement around the basic research supplements. The quote that I'm going to read is from that first executive committee meeting and there they wanted Circulation Research to be the authoritative new journal for investigators of basic sciences as they apply to the heart and circulation.

Cindy S.H.:                        

It's a fun little subgroup that they list after that. They list in anatomy, biology, biochemistry, morphology, which I just think is so neat to think about, pathology, physics, pharmacology, and others. It's interesting to think about what that would be today if we were now finding this journal. Biochemistry, genetics, molecular biology. It's fun to think about how much science has changed since they began this journal. Really the broader goal was to integrate and disseminate new knowledge. Leading that was Dr. Carl Wiggers, who was the first editor in chief of Circ Research. At the time, he was the head of physiology at Western Reserve University, and he's often referred to as the dean of physiology, as his research really provided much of the fundamental knowledge regarding the pressures in the heart and the vessels of the body and how they interact.

Cindy S.H.:                        

I actually went back and looked at some of the first titles in Volume One, Issue One, of Circ Research. It's really kind of neat. Some of them could be completely relevant today. I'm just going to read a few. Nucleotide Metabolism and Cardiac Activity, Fundamental Differences in the Reactivity of Blood Vessels in Skin Compared to Those in the Muscle. That was at the VRIC the other day. Haemodynamic Studies of Tricuspid Stenosis of Rheumatic Origin. Reading these for the first time I actually got chills because my two themes of my lab are both in that first Volume One, Issue One, of that journal. I study the extracellular nucleotide aCD73 and its impact on vascular homeostasis. I also study calcific aortic valve disease and are hugely curious about the role of inflammation and things like rheumatic heart disease in the progression of the disease. It's amazing how much science has changed, but yet how so much has stayed the same.

Cindy S.H.:                        

Dr. Wiggers wrote a few gems, a few quotes in his biography that I want to share with you. I find them inspiring and also humbling. The first is, "Research is a gamble in which the laws of chance favor the loser. The loser must remain a good sport," which I think is perfect to think about in science. I really wish I had read that after my first RO1 was triaged. The next two are more about the science writing and I think they're great not only for when we're thinking about papers but also grants. The first is, "Readers are greatly influenced in their judgment of a research project by literary style. A poor presentation can easily damage the best investigation," which is so true. No matter how good your science is, if you can't communicate it, it doesn't matter. And lastly, "A good paper, like a good glass of beer, should be neither largely foam nor flat. It should have just the right amount of head of foam to make it palatable."

Cindy S.H.:                        

With these nuggets of wisdom, we're now going to talk with Drs. Jane Freedman, who's now the editor in chief of Circ Research, and Dr. Milka Koupenova, who is the social media editor. Before I really introduce Jane, I want to recognize all of the former editors in chief of Circ Research, Dr. Carl Wiggers, Dr. Carl Schmidt, Dr. Eugene Landis, Dr. Julius Comroe, Dr. Robert Berne, Dr. Brian Hoffman, Dr. Francis Abboud, Dr. Harry Fozzard, Dr. Stephen Vatner, Dr. Eduardo Marbán, Dr. Roberto Bolli, and now Dr. Jane Freedman. Welcome, Jane. Thank you so much for this opportunity and congratulations on your new position.

Dr. Freedman:                  

Thank you very much.

Cindy S.H.:                        

I was wondering if you could just introduce yourself to the listeners and give us a little bit about your background.

Dr. Freedman:                  

Sure. I am the Budnitz Professor of Medicine at the University of Massachusetts, and I originally became interested in a scientific career while attending Yale University where I was both an architecture and geology major.

Cindy S.H.:                        

Interesting.

Dr. Freedman:                  

Yes, very interesting. Then, not exactly knowing what I wanted to do, I worked for a year as a research assistant for my later-to-be mentor Dr. Joe Loscalzo at Brigham and Women's Hospital. There one day he sent me up to the intensive care unit and said we need to get a tube of blood from someone who was in the throes of having a myocardial infarction. Really at that point I became hooked. Why was that person having a heart attack, and using their blood how could I figure out whether they would live, die, do well, not do well, or yield new things that might help us cure or diagnose people with heart attacks later on? After that. I went to Tufts Medical School. I did my residency and cardiology fellowship at Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Massachusetts General Hospital. After working at several different places, I have wound up at the University of Massachusetts where I am in the Division of Cardiology and where my laboratory currently resides.

Cindy S.H.:                        

Excellent. As the new editor in chief, what do you see as your vision for the journal?

Dr. Freedman:                  

I'm in a very fortunate position to be taking over a wonderful journal from an incredibly dedicated group of editors and associate editors and other supportive editors. Scientific pursuits and reporting and publications are really evolving at a rapid clip, so we hope to have several things happen over the next few years to survive and thrive. The first thing is we hope to define and expand Circulation Research's scientific identity. We want to extend its already outstanding portfolio of science that really demonstrates how elegant basic and translational mechanisms and pathways are part of a greater web of cardiovascular disease and stroke. This will include an increasingly diverse group of basic and translational sciences and they'll touch on both fundamental studies as well as how they translate to human disease. We also want to continue to pursue the excellence that Circulation Research already epitomizes and we want to extend its brand both to an increasingly diverse group of members, both nationally and internationally.

Dr. Freedman:                  

Circulation Research already has really wonderful publication metrics such as turnaround time, time to review, and we hope to maintain that so as to be a journal of choice for an increasingly growing number of investigators. We would also very much like to have greater interface with the American Heart Association. A lot of the research on our pages is funded by the American Heart Association, and the majority of science that the American Heart Association currently funds is basic cardiovascular science. We hope to have greater interface and help our users of the journal understand what the American Heart Association can do for them and for their scientific pursuits.

Dr. Freedman:                  

Last and very importantly, we really want to attract early and mid-career investigators to the journal. We already have some really nice programs that the previous editorship has started, such as Meet The First Author, but we would also like to be a site for education of how you can review papers, have a junior editor program and other types of programs that will help early and mid-career investigators in their future. One of the ways we're going to be doing that is to have enhanced social media programs.

Cindy S.H.:                        

Great. I really like that idea of having the junior editors because I think the best learning experience I had about how to write a grant did not happen until I actually served on a study section, because it was there you actually can understand all of those comments you got on your first grant that was triaged and why they were said. I think that is a key and really important aspect.

Dr. Freedman:                  

That's a perfect analogy because you want to remove the black box that people think is happening when they send their manuscripts in. There's so many reasons why manuscripts succeed and don't succeed, and we really do want to be as transparent as possible and we do want to educate investigators as much as possible about the process.

Cindy S.H.:                        

Actually, could you maybe tell us a little bit about that process? I made all my figures, I formatted my paper according to the instructions, I hit submit. Black box. What happens? What's the next step?

Dr. Freedman:                  

What's the next step?

Cindy S.H.:                        

What do you do? What does an editor in chief actually do?

Dr. Freedman:                  

I do have to say that none of this would happen, especially in the incredibly quick turnaround time, if we didn't have amazing support and help in our office that happens to be in Baltimore. The people there are just incredible. They make sure that papers move through. It's really 24/7. Our group has not been at it for very long, but I know Dr. Bolli's group as well as our group, people are handling manuscripts as fast as they really come in. We see the manuscript, they get quality checked. We try not to be too onerous with the first steps. Then typically they go to one of the associate or deputy editors who will handle them to send out for review.

Cindy S.H.:                        

Is that based on keywords or the title or how is that decided?

Dr. Freedman:                  

Sometimes it's based on keywords, so careful with your keywords. A lot of times, because each of the associate editors has an area of expertise that hopefully covers what your science is interested in, they will know experts in the field. We very heavily rely on our editorial board. We have an amazing editorial board at Circulation Research, and amazing contributions from the BCBS council. These individuals have over the years and currently provided just tireless and unsung, devoted help to making the journal run smoothly. It's a pretty quick turnaround time. Then the decision made based on the reviews of the article. Occasionally articles come in and they're not suitable for the journal because they're not what we perceive as what our readers would be interested in. Sometimes those articles don't go up for review. We don't want to keep them caught up, so we send them back right away.

Dr. Freedman:                  

When the articles come back in with the reviews, we're going to be discussing them at a weekly meeting. Other viewpoints will weigh in, and then we make a decision whether it's an accept, whether it's a revise, whether it needs a lot more science. That's called a de novo. Sometimes we think it's more suitable for one of the other 11 American Heart Journals and we might suggest that you consider sending it to that journal and we consult with that journal's editor.

Cindy S.H.:                        

Interesting. All that happens with about 14 days.

Dr. Freedman:                  

That's supposed to happen with 14 days.

Cindy S.H.:                        

It does pretty regularly based on the stats. That's amazing. One of the initiatives you mentioned was really the role of social media. Now I would like to introduce Dr Milka Koupenova, who is the co social media editor alongside me. Before I let Milka talk, I really have to be honest and say that my graduate school days were some of the best of my life. It was in part because Milka I were both in the same lab. We overlapped by a couple of years under the amazing mentorship of Dr. Katya Ravid. Every time we get together, all we'd talk about was how can we be like Katya? Maybe someday we'll actually have a podcast where we can get Katya in here and actually record all her nuggets of wisdom.

Dr. Koupenova:                

I think the same thing about Katya.

Cindy S.H.:                        

How can it be more like Katya? But for now, Milka, welcome. Thank you. If you could just introduce yourself and give us a little bit about your background.

Dr. Koupenova:                

Hi, everybody. My name is Milka Koupenova. I am an assistant professor at University of Massachusetts Medical School. Briefly about me, as Cindy mentioned, I did my PhD at Boston University and I studied at that time metabolism in atherosclerosis. Then I had this great opportunity to join this lab in thrombosis that studied these little cell fragments called platelets, which I knew something but not that much about. I joined Dr. Freedman lab as a postdoctoral fellow, and actually my interest evolved to be very much in platelet immunobiology and how platelets may contribute to thrombotic disease during viral infections. Luckily for me, I had two angels that I wanted to be. One of them was Katya Ravid, as you mentioned, and the other one was Dr. Freedman. Both set up a great example of scientists and how to do science in life.

Cindy S.H.:                        

Wonderful. Excellent. Thank you. I won't lie. I don't know if you feel this way. I definitely feel a little nervous about being a social media editor. I'm talking in a room to a box with a microphone on me and I don't know who's going to be listening. That's also exciting for me too. I get to disseminate all this cool knowledge and share our basic research with this huge audience. What are you most nervous about and excited about?

Dr. Koupenova:                

You're doing the podcast, so I don't have to worry about that, that that particular part. I am quite excited actually about everything that's going to surround popularizing the science at Circulation Research. I think in the time that we live in and when social media is a huge part of our life, we definitely need to engage the community, scientific or lay, and communicate our ideas. I'm super excited about the creative part behind how we are going to achieve this via various social medias.

Cindy S.H.:                        

Can you talk about the platforms that you plan on using?

Dr. Koupenova:                

We currently are using Twitter and Facebook. Please follow us on Twitter and Facebook. And we are going to launch Instagram. Find us, follow us, engage us. That will be great. You can always send us messages and like us, retweet whatever you decide.

Cindy S.H.:                        

Give podcast feedback on Twitter. Nice comments only.

Dr. Koupenova:                

We'd like to hear your comments and we'd like to hear what you envision in certain cases when it comes to your Circulation Research, because this is your journal as much as it is ours. We're here for you. In addition to popularize and advertise the wonderful science that we're publishing in Circ Research, we want you to be engaged. We want you to be able to advertise in your own work and to think of it as something that you own and something you need to communicate to the rest of the world. That is one of the things that we want to do.

Dr. Koupenova:                

Finally I'm going to echo on what Dr. Freedman said, is we want to attract truly early career and young investigators and help them be involved, help them own their science and help them communicate their ideas. That's pretty much what our social media platform is and we are going to evolve with you. That is perhaps one of the challenges.

Cindy S.H.:                        

I think one of the most interesting aspects, at least in academia as I see it, is really the role of self-promotion. It's something you're never taught and it's something that you don't really appreciate until you go to that conference. I remember my first conference as a new PI, I was standing there and I'm just like, "Okay, these are all other PIs. How are they all in groups? How does everybody know each other? Why are they all friends already?" It takes a lot of guts and you have to inject yourself. "Hi. I'm Cindy St. Hilaire and I'm new. Please be my friend," essentially, essentially. But it's important and I really liked the fact that when your journal is published you have that little button, share on Twitter, share on Facebook. I think that's really important. It helps you practice that self-promotion and can help really allow you to embrace your extrovert when you know how to.

Dr. Koupenova:                

That's exactly what I was going to point out. Scientists or physician scientists, or physician scientists perhaps are a bit better. But as scientists we're very much introverted. But social media gives you a platform that it's not cheesy to popularize and communicate. Then you see those people on conferences and then you have your little group without-

Cindy S.H.:                        

It's amazing how many Twitter friends I have. "Oh, I met you on Twitter. It's so nice to meet you in real life."

Dr. Koupenova:                

It's a new generation. We at Circ Research want to evolve with it. Is that correct, Dr. Freedman?

Dr. Freedman:                  

That is correct. Thank you very much.

Cindy S.H.:                        

It's exciting times. I guess maybe this is a question for all of us to talk about, but how do you think we can, number one, attract people to science, attract diverse people to science, and then really keep them in science and how do you think we can use Circ Research and also the social media aspects of Circ Research to do that?

Dr. Freedman:                  

I think, first of all, people have to see themselves in the journal. The journal, I think the first point I talked about, about being inclusive, inclusive types of people, way people consume science, types of science. We really want people to feel like Circ Research isn't just a journal that puts out scientific papers, but is a forum. It's a forum for them to exchange ideas and it's a forum for them to understand better about their scientific careers.

Cindy S.H.:                        

Great. Thank you. This has been an amazing first podcast. I'm so happy to share it with the two of you and I'm super excited for this opportunity. Again, Jane, I want to congratulate you on your new position as editor in chief and I can't help but mention as the first female editor in chief. That's a wonderful, wonderful thing.

Cindy S.H.:                        

You can find us on Twitter. The handle is @CircRes, at C-I-R-C-R-E-S. We're also on Instagram using the same name, C-I-R-C-R-E-S. We hope to hear from you there.

Cindy S.H.:                        

Thank you for listening. I'm your host, Cindy St. Hilaire, and this is Discover CircRes, your source for the most up-to-date and exciting discoveries in basic cardiovascular research.