October 2019 Discover CircRes

This month on Episode 5 of the Discover CircRes podcast, host Cindy St. Hilaire highlights five featured articles from the September 27 and October 11, 2019 issues of Circulation Research and talks with Sarvesh Chelvanambi and Matthias Clauss  about their article HIV-Nef Protein Transfer to Endothelial Cells Requires Rac1 Activation and Leads to Endothelial Dysfunction: Implications for Statin Treatment in HIV Patients.

 

Article highlights:
 

Stamatelopoulos, et al. Reactive Vasodilation in AL Amyloidosis

 

Cao, et al. Miro2-Mediated Cardiac Mitochondrial Communication

 

Georgakis, et al. Circulating MCP-1 Levels and Incident Stroke

 

Sun, et al. Body Mass Index and DNA Methylation

 

Tan, et al. Yy1 Suppresses DCM Through Bmp7 and Ctgf

Transcript
Cindy St. H:                       Hi. Welcome to Discover CircRes, the monthly podcast of the American Heart Association's journal, Circulation Research. I'm your host, Dr Cindy St. Hilaire, and I'm an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh. My goal as host of this podcast is to share with you highlights from recent articles published in the September 27th and October 11th issues of Circulation Research.

                                           We'll also have an in-depth conversation with Drs Matthias Clauss and Sarvesh Chelvanambi, who are the lead authors in one of the exciting discoveries from our October 11th issue.

                                           The first article I want to share with you is titled, Reactive Vasodilation Predicts Mortality in Primary Systemic Light Chain Amyloidosis. The first authors are Drs Kimon Stamatelopoulos, Georgios Georgiopoulos, and the corresponding author is Dr Efstathios Kastritis. And the studies were conducted at the National Kapodistrian University of Athens School of Medicine in Athens, Greece.

                                           So we hear about amyloids a lot in things like Alzheimer's, but amyloids are really just aggregates of protein that fold into shapes. And the nature of these shapes allows these individual protein molecules to bind and form many copies that form these fibers that are rather sticky. And the fibers then aggregate into larger and larger globules. And light chain amyloidosis is the most common type of amyloidosis. It's a rare but deadly disease, and it's caused by antibody-producing cells that are aberrantly churning out parts of antibodies called light chains. And it's these light chains that will aggregate and form sticky fibers.

                                           So these fibers aggregate and form amyloid deposits, and these deposits build up and damage the organs and the tissue in which they're accumulating. And because it's dependent on where the aggregates are accumulating, AL amyloidosis can present with a wide variety of symptoms. However, symptoms of heart dysfunction and low blood pressure correlate with poor prognosis.

                                           And because vascular dysfunction can contribute to hypotension or low blood pressure, this group decided to examine the vascular health of patients by conducting a measurement called flow-mediated vasodilation. And so this is a measurement where the diameter of the brachial artery, which is located in your arm, is measured before and then after a brief period of lower arm ischemia. And they formed a cohort of 115 newly diagnosed AL patients and another cohort of 115 matched controls. This study found that in AL patients, flow-mediated vasodilation was higher than in aged, sex, and cardiovascular risk factor-matched controls. The mean follow-up time for this study was 54 months, and in that time, the authors went on to find that high values of FMD in the amyloidosis patients was strongly predictive of mortality. In fact, high FMD values were more predictive of death than some measures of cardiovascular health. These results suggest that flow-mediated vasodilation may be a superior means of identifying AL patients most at risk and for assessing potential benefits of therapeutic interventions.

                                           The next article I'd like to highlight is titled, Miro2 Regulates Inter-Mitochondrial Communication in the Heart and Protects Against TAC-Induced Cardiac Dysfunction. The first author is Yangpo Cao, and the corresponding author is Ming Zheng. And the work was conducted at Peking University, Beijing, China, Key Laboratory of Molecular Cardiovascular Science at the Ministry of Education, also in Beijing, China.

                                           Beating heart cells have very high energy requirements, and thus they need lots of fully functioning mitochondria. And as we all know from our good old high school biology days, mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell. Mitochondrial health and performance is directly dependent on the ability of individual mitochondria to be able to communicate with each other. In many cells, this mitochondrial communication occurs via the fusion of mitochondria into a giant network. However, in cardiomyocytes, the mitochondrial movement is much more constrained. In cardiomyocytes, mitochondria communicate by briefly connecting with neighboring mitochondria, which is often called kissing, mitochondrial kissing, or by nanotunneling, which is when the mitochondria create a sustained connection by means of long nanometer-sized tubular protrusions called nanotubes. And it's thought that the proper health of the cell is dependent on proper mitochondrial communication.

                                           Miro2 is a Rho GTPase on the outer mitochondrial membrane and it harbors a calcium sensing domain. Miro2 can interact with transport proteins to promote mitochondrial transport along microtubules in a calcium-dependent manner. This group wanted to investigate whether Miro2 regulates cardiac inter- mitochondrial communication. To do this, they used transverse aortic constriction or TAC or they used an Ang II infusion model to induce hypertrophy in murine hearts. Using these two models, they found Miro2 expression was decreased via Parkin-mediated ubiquitination, and they also found that inter-mitochondrial communication was disrupted.

                                           By contrast, transgenic mice over-expressing Miro2 were more resistant to hypertrophy, and they were able to do this by maintaining proper cardiac function than their wild type counterparts. Together these results reveal a novel role for Miro2 in mitochondrial communication and show that maintaining such communication may mitigate effects of hypertrophy.

                                           The next paper I want to highlight is titled, Circulating Monocyte Chemoattractant Protein-1 or MCP-1 and the Risk of Stroke: A Meta-Analysis of Population-Based Studies Involving 17,180 individuals. That is a huge study. The first author is Marios Georgakis, and the corresponding author is Martin Dichgans. And they are from the University of Munich in Munich, Germany.

                                           A major component of atherosclerosis is chronic inflammation and inhibiting the activity of proinflammatory cytokines has been identified as a potential therapeutic strategy to help slow the disease progression. One such cytokine under study is monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 or MCP-1, and animal studies have shown that blocking MCP-1 limits, or boosting MCP-1, accelerates atherosclerosis. However, large scale observational studies of MCP-1 in humans are lacking. To address this gap in knowledge, this group performed a meta-analysis of previously unpublished data from six population cohorts, which totaled over 17,000 individuals.

                                           These individuals were followed for an average of 16 years, which when you think about it, this is an absolutely huge study. So in looking at this cohort of patients, the team identified a significant association between high baseline MCP-1 levels and the likelihood of suffering a future ischemic stroke. Interestingly, this effect was not seen with hemorrhagic stroke, which is typically not associated with atherosclerosis. These findings not only support the previous animal studies, but also support a recent study in humans in which a genetic predisposition for high levels of MCP-1 was associated with an increased risk of coronary artery disease and stroke. This study also suggests that future studies should explore the potential of lowering MCP-1 levels as a possible prevention strategy. Perhaps there could be another CANTOS-like trial where we use something to block MCP-1 signaling. Maybe that would have much broader effects. I guess we'll have to wait and see what the data says.

                                           The next paper I want to highlight is titled, Body Mass Index Drives Changes in DNA Methylation, a Longitudinal Study. The first authors are Dianjianyi Sun, Tao Zhong and Shaoyong Su, and the corresponding authors are Shengxu Li and Wei Chen. And they're from the Children's Minnesota Research Institute, Children's Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Minnesota and The Peking University Health Science Center in Beijing, China, respectively.

                                           So it's well appreciated that obesity is increasing worldwide. And obesity contributes to a whole host of cardiovascular morbidity, and ultimately contributes to mortality. It's also well known that environmental factors such as the food we eat and the air we breathe, as well as genetic factors, can influence a person's risk of obesity. And recently there have been studies that suggest that perhaps epigenetic factors also contribute to obesity. And just to remind you what epigenetics is, DNA is the genetic code, and mutations can happen on DNA that can alter either gene expression or maybe protein folding or whether a protein is made at all. But epigenetic factors are not as permanent as DNA mutations.

                                           Epigenetic factors are alterable modifications that can happen to DNA itself or that can happen to the proteins on which the DNA is wrapped around. And epigenome-wide association studies have shown that DNA methylation at certain loci is linked to an increase in body mass index, or BMI. However, it's unknown whether these methylations are a cause or consequence of obesity.

                                           So to get to the bottom of this, this group performed a large-scale longitudinal study. They examined thousands of DNA methylation sites in 995 white individuals and 490 black individuals. And they also determined the subjects' BMIs. They did this at a baseline measurement and then approximately six years later, they collected the same data in the same patient cohort. What they found was that only a handful of methylation sites were shared between the two ethnicities. And in both groups, however, there was a similar unidirectional link between BMI and methylation. Very interestingly, baseline BMI could predict methylation at a number of genetic loci. However, the team found that none of those baseline methylation sites could predict future BMI. From this data, the authors are able to conclude that it's obesity driving the methylation at certain genetic loci as opposed to certain genetic loci driving obesity, which I think is just extremely interesting. Really nice study.

                                           The last article I want to highlight for you is a paper titled, Yin Yang 1 Suppresses Dilated Cardiomyopathy and Cardiac Fibrosis Through Regulation of Bmp7 and Ctgf. The first author is Chia Yee Tan, and the corresponding author is Jianming Jiang, and they're from the National University of Singapore.

                                           Dilated cardiomyopathy or DCM is characterized by left ventricle enlargement and associated contractile dysfunction and fibrosis. Patients with DCM are at risk of arrhythmia and also of sudden death. And there's actually a huge number of genetic variants that have been linked to DCM, but the most common one or the most well-studied are mutations that affect the nuclear lamin gene or LMNA. So LMNA knockout mice are used to study the role of this gene in DCM, and these animals exhibit not only cardiac defects but also systemic defects. And those systemic defects include things like shorter lifespan, growth retardation, muscular dystrophy, neuropathy, and lipodystrophy.

                                           Recently, LMNA-related dilated cardiomyopathy was linked to the deregulation of cardiac cell cycle. Meaning there was issues in how these cardiac cells are proliferating. So in this study, Tan and colleagues showed that boosting expression of a protein involved in cell cycle regulation, this protein is called Yin Yang 1, so boosting this gene's expression actually reversed the dilated cardiomyopathy symptoms in mice with heart-specific LMNA deficiency. Compared with untreated mice, mice receiving Yy1 via an adenoviral vector exhibited improved cardiac function and also reduced fibrosis after four weeks. The team then went on to show that Yy1 treatment prompted suppression of the extracellular matrix factor, Ctgf, and the upregulation of the growth factor, Bmp7.

                                           Now, neither of these factors alone could rescue the symptoms of LMNA lacking mice. However, when both of these factors were manipulated together, they mimicked Yy1 treatment. These results highlight that Yin Yang 1 and its downstream targets Bmp7 and Ctgf are key players and potential therapeutic targets that can be harnessed for tackling LMNA-driven dilated cardiomyopathy.

                                           Okay, so now we're going to have our interview with Drs Matthias Clauss and Sarvesh Chelvanambi. And they are from Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis, Indiana. And their title of their paper is, HIV-Nef Protein Transfer to Endothelial Cells Requires Rac1 Activation and Leads to Endothelial Dysfunction: Implications for Statin Treatment in HIV Patients. So thank you both very much for joining me.

Sarvesh C:                         Thank you so much, Cindy.

Matthias C:                       Thanks for having us here.

Cindy St. H:                       Could you both introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about your background?

Sarvesh C:                         My name is Sarvesh Chelvanambi. I grew up in Chennai, India. I did my undergraduate degree at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. I got a Bachelor of Arts in Zoology with a minor in Finance. I then went to the Pennsylvania State University where I got my Masters in Biotechnology before coming over to Indiana University in 2014 to do my PhD work. And then I joined the lab of Dr Matthias Clauss, and in 2016, I got an American Heart Association predoctoral fellowship to study this project specifically.

Cindy St. H:                       Wow! Congratulations. That's wonderful.

Sarvesh C:                         Thank you so much.

Cindy St. H:                       And now you completed the circle by publishing your AHA grant in Circulation Research.

Sarvesh C:                         Exactly.

Cindy St. H:                       And Matthias, how about you?

Matthias C:                       I'm a Research Professor at IU School of Medicine, and my research interests focus in understanding how stressors connected with endothelium in this way contribute to vascular disease. These stressors include cigarette smoke and viral infections. Regarding viral agents, we are studying both acute infections and chronic infections and that is HIV. This HIV interest started actually 12 years ago in collaboration with Dr Samir Gupta who is also of course on this paper. We started off with a simple question, why are there so many cardiovascular events in patients, in HIV patients, with interrupted antiretroviral therapy?

Cindy St. H:                       So it's not just the fact that they're HIV positive, it's that they were on therapy and then went off it?

Matthias C:                       Yes. And this was part of this SMART study and this study was then actually halted because of the safety issues.

Cindy St. H:                       So you're starting with the idea that patients with HIV who go off this antiviral therapy are more prone or get more cardiovascular events. So what did you start with, with this particular study?

Matthias C:                       Well, our overarching idea was that the HIV virus could also do damage in the era of the combined antiretroviral therapy. And we started up with two questions, one was, is there an HIV protein which is persistent? And the other question, how is this HIV protein, if there's any one which is persistent, performing this? And this may be then leading over to your specific way to address these questions.

Sarvesh C:                         That's kind of where we are starting with this project. Because back in 2016, the START trial came out saying, "We need to change the way we treat HIV patients," because initially the previous regimen of our drugs had a lot of metabolic side effects, but the current regimen of integrase inhibitors is actually really good and has very low metabolic effects. So there was a New England Journal Of Medicine paper that said, "Well, if a patient walks into the clinic, they're diagnosed as being HIV positive, put them on antiretroviral therapy right away."

                                           But even in this era when everybody is on ART and there's almost no viral replication, you still see the persistence of a lot of comorbidities. And especially those associated with vascular events, whether it's peripheral arterial disease, coronary arterial disease, and a lot of other vascular diseases in the lung, or the kidney or the brain. So that kind of is what set us up, is there an element in the blood of these patients that is contributing towards vascular dysfunction?

Cindy St. H:                       And so the protein that you are talking about in this paper is a protein called Nef, and is that where you come in,  Sarvash?

Sarvesh C:                         Yes, because the project before I joined the lab, that's kind of where it led off, saying that Nef can get to the endothelium and it's very good at killing endothelial cells, but the mechanism through which it transfers into endothelial cells and the signaling pathways that Nef hijacks to induce this apoptosis was not clearly elucidated. A lot of work is done in Nef in monocytes and macrophages because as an HIV protein, it was studied in CD40 cells and the whole immune system as a whole, but we were the first to leverage all of those findings within an endothelial context and answer the questions, so what does Nef do and how does it get there?

Cindy St. H:                       All right, so tell us a little bit what does it do and how does it get there?

Sarvesh C:                         So we started doing some experiments with starting with HIV patient blood. So we took two fragments, we took the PBMC fraction, that Dr Clauss was talking about, which we knew had Nef within many of those cells. We also took the extracellular vesicle fraction, and we chose to look at this because there's a lot of literature out there saying that this fraction could not only disseminate particles throughout the body but also help signal through that. So in both of these fractions we added to the endothelial cells, we found increased apoptosis in HIV patients when compared to HIV negative patients.

                                           And we were excited, but then we went and asked which of these patients had HIV Nef positivity in their blood, and then using that information when we stratified our apoptosis results, we made the surprising observation that the HIV positive, Nef positive patients were more prone to endothelial cell apoptosis. And this sparked a lot of conversation, so how do we target this and what is the signaling pathway it gets into? And that is kind of what led to most of the work in this paper, where you're showing that the transfer is mediated by extracellular, because this is such a nice tool, for HIV I guess, to spread itself into literally every cell type. Because while the HIV virus can only infect very few cell types, extracellular vesicles can be taken up by anything.

                                           And the second observation we made was within endothelial cells, we found the signaling pathways that Nef was able to hijack to induce cell death. And that became the focus of this paper.

Cindy St. H:                       That was one thing I wanted you to clarify, because I think what a really interesting aspect of this study is that it's the immune cells that are infected. The endothelial cells themselves are healthy and really they're getting this damage from the vesicles. That is,…wow! I don't know. It's just a really, really neat study. So can you tell us a little bit about the techniques you used in this paper?

Sarvesh C:                         Yes, so we did a lot of assays to evaluate endothelial cell stress. So we started by looking at apoptosis, and a lot of those studies were done by looking at caspase-3 activity, which is a classic marker for cell death. We also did a lot of microscopy work where we took out extracellular vesicles out of those vesicles on the endothelial cells to show the uptake of Nef protein and thereby hammer that extracellular vesicles are indeed a mechanism of transfer for this protein in particular.

                                           Now, one of the interesting experiments that we actually ended up doing, which was not a part of this paper really, was we wanted to see if chemotaxis was being affected by this. So we took an endothelial monolayer and separated T-cells that are expressing Nef using a Transwell membrane. And I had this huge problem where I couldn't read for a week because instead of using the 4-micron filters that allow T-cells to transfer, I was using 0.4 micron filters that T-cells cannot transfer through. But I still went about it and did my whole experiment because I didn't make that realization until a week later, because when I looked at the bottom of these chambers, there were no T-cells at all. But when I looked at the endothelial cells, I observed cytoplasmic transfer and Nef transfer, and we had a couple of conversations going, why is this happening? Did the T-cells all die or did they disappear?

                                           And that's when we went back and looked in literature and found that Nef is very good at making virion particles. And those are the similar pathways that extracellular vesicle trafficking comes from. And so that was a huge shift in the way this project was designed and where we then started looking into the modes of transfer, the protein and the subsequent apoptosis that that transfer can cause.

Cindy St. H:                       I love this story. So essentially your mistaken filter created this paper and this finding of the vesicles affecting the endothelial cells.

Matthias C:                       Yeah, that's a typical finding for practitioner Chelvanambi, because he has this gift to turn negative things into positive things. So we have a lot of fun, and this mistake was really the beginning of a great study.

Cindy St. H:                       That's wonderful. Really beautiful images, as well. So a little bit digging into, I guess, the next step. So first off, how were the endothelial cells getting damaged? They're getting damaged from these extracellular vesicles, but then what's Nef doing in the endothelial cell? What's happening there?

Sarvesh C:                         So that was a very big question because if you look at it, Nef is a very small protein with almost no known enzymatic function. And yet it is able to interact with a lot of host proteins, which I guess makes it a very good viral protein. So when I went back and looked at literature, there were a host of studies in the 90s to show that Nef interacts with this kinase and that small GTPases, and there was a giant list for us to go after. And we were kind of left a bit fuddled, because we were like, which signaling pathway do we start with?

Cindy St. H:                       Right. It's almost like there's too many.

Sarvesh C:                         Exactly. And so what we ended up doing was we started looking into one of the various mutants of Nef that we had access to. And one of these mutants was a mutant that was incapable of PAK2 activation, and we showed that that doesn't have a lot of these stress damages. So we asked, "What is directly upstream of PAK2?" And that is where Rac1 came into the picture. And the small GTPase Rac1 is a nice candidate because it is also a master of many, many trades.

Cindy St. H:                       I love this because it's such an interesting multidisciplinary approach to addressing the question, why are patients with HIV getting more cardiovascular events? What do you think evolutionarily is going on? Why would this be beneficial? Why would damaging the endothelium be beneficial? What are your thoughts on that?

Sarvesh C:                         Personally, I think this is a side effect because HIV is never meant to exist in the era of ART. One of the analogies I always like to use is from Harry Potter, where HIV is Voldemort, which is the big bad villain. And what we have done is a really good job of banishing Voldemort. But what we have failed to do as a field is target its Death Eater, Nef. And I think with what we are suggesting, this paper with additional statins and other strategies that focus this, we can get to that point where we not only block HIV expansion but also the expansion of its minions, Nef.

Cindy St. H:                       I love this analogy. I think you should redo your graphical abstract in a Harry Potter theme.

Matthias C:                       Yeah, but I like your question. But also in this regard, I think it may be an example of a novel mechanism, how viral infections work in a different way than just infecting cells. And there's evidence from lots of viruses that they make toxic proteins, and why they are doing this, we don't know. But we noticed that the systemic effect of Nef may have some advantage for the infectious agent, because it makes T-cells more sticky, it makes them stick and transmigrate through the endothelium, and that is also shown in our paper.

Cindy St. H:                       You have evidence that perhaps statins would be beneficial to give to these HIV patients on ART therapy. Can you tell us a little bit about that and how that would work?

Sarvesh C:                         So based on what we did on our mouse studies that was a part of this paper, even after there is endothelial dysfunction, treatment with statins was able to restore endothelial function. Currently, there is a study going on called The Reprieve Trial where they're giving a statin called pitavastatin to HIV patients. The interesting part here is that these are HIV patients who don't have dyslipidemia. And the long-term goal is that statin treatment can help prevent the development of cardiovascular events. We're eagerly awaiting the results of this trial.

Cindy St. H:                       Well done. Well thank you so much for speaking with me today. It was a pleasure to speak with you, Dr Chelvanambi and Dr Clauss. And congratulations again on this beautiful project, this beautiful story. And really, the implications for helping patients with HIV is really profound. HIV used to always be in the news and now that we have the ART therapy it's not talked about as much, but these patients are still in danger and I think your study is really doing a lot to highlight that and maybe even help them. So thank you very much and congratulations.

Matthias C:                       Thank you.

Sarvesh C:                         Thank you so much for the opportunity.

Cindy St. H:                       So that's it for highlights from the September 27th and October 11th issues of Circulation Research. Thank you so much for listening. This podcast is produced by Rebecca McTavish, edited by Melissa Stoner, and supported by the editorial team of Circulation Research. Some of the copy text for the highlighted articles is provided by Ruth Williams.

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