New Biomarker to Prevent Severe Bouts of Low Blood Sugar in Diabetics

A new biomarker might possibly furnish new clues required to develop a diagnostic tool for hypoglycemia-associated autonomic failure (HAAF), an LSU Pennington Biomedical Research Center study found. There is no current objective diagnostic device for this life-threatening condition, if unchecked.

"There is currently no objective way for a health care provider to measure whether a patient has experienced repeated episodes of low blood sugar and therefore may be suffering from HAAF," said David McDougal, Ph.D., assistant professor-research and head of Pennington Biomedical's Neurobiology of Metabolic Dysfunction Laboratory.

Researchers at LSU Pennington Biomedical aimed to find ways via which biomedical imaging could present new solutions that enable measurement of occurrence of glucose level collapse. Instead of looking at glucose uptake in the directly in the brain, they focused on the adaptation of the brain after an incidence of crashed glucose levels.

The brain adapts by heightening the rate at which it utilizes other energy sources, like acetate, when glucose is not available.

"The results of our study suggest that this adaptation may still be present after exposure to times of low blood sugar and therefore can be used to measure how frequently a person experiences low blood sugar," McDougal said. "We believe that by measuring how well a person's brain uses acetate, we might one day be able to determine if they are suffering from HAAF or are at increased risk for developing the condition in the near future."

This would enable doctors to offer treatment for decreasing this risk by altering the medication the person is on or recommending the use of a glucose monitoring device, McDougal said.

He remarks that "more studies will have to be conducted in order to demonstrate if this biomarker can be of practical clinical use." He has applied for a provisional patent for his breakthrough.

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Quick Analysis of Hundreds of Proteins from a Single Blood Sample

Scientists from McGill University have developed a novel technology to quickly analyze hundreds of proteins from a single blood sample in a cost-effective manner. There are around 20,000 proteins present in our bodies. But till date, only one specific protein can be detected at a time. The proteins act as biomarkers to provide key information about the health condition for both clinicians and scientists.

Milad Dagher, a Ph.D. candidate, Professor David Juncker and their colleagues from McGill's Department of Biomedical Engineering, have developed this method and a section of this work was published in Nature Nanotechnology.

With the help of multicolor fluorescent dyes, micro-beads are barcoded which enables detection of markers in the same solution. The cytometer is a laser instrument which counts the proteins that stick to the beads.

A new algorithm has been developed by the team to enable different colors of micro-beads generated with high accuracy for the improved analysis of proteins.

Milad Dagher said, "Current technologies hold a major trade-off between the number of proteins that can be measured at once and the cost and accuracy of a test; This means that large-scale studies, such as clinical trials, are underpowered because they tend to fall back on tried-and-true platforms with limited capabilities."

Their upcoming work is focused on maintaining precise detection of proteins with increased scale.

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New Blood Test Foresees Risk for Kidney Cancer and Survival Five Years Before Diagnosis

The most prevalent type of kidney cancer, clear cell kidney cancer, could be predicted years prior to clinical diagnosis by a crucial biomarker of kidney disease. Kidney-injury-molecule-1 (KIM-1) can be identified in urine and blood and usually exists in little quantities in healthy persons.

A new study published in Clinical Cancer Research, headed by BWH investigators, along with colleagues from Beth-Israel Deaconess Medical Center, evaluates the role of a blood test in detecting elevated amounts of KIM-1 in patients who may develop kidney cancer up to five years in future. Their results reveal that KIM-1 could establish a distinction between those who developed kidney cancer from those who did not.

"Early detection of kidney cancer can be lifesaving. We can cure kidney cancer when we detect it at an early stage, but patients with advanced kidney cancer have a very high death rate," said Venkata Sabbisetti, Ph.D., a research faculty member in the BWH Renal Division. “Our results suggest that with further refinement, KIM-1 has the potential to identify patients with early, curable kidney cancer."

The team noted that supplementing a model with KIM-1 for predicting kidney cancer risk roughly doubled the precision of that model. KIM-1showed significantly higher sensitivity for kidney cancer detection compared to prostate-specific antigen’s sensitivity for prostate cancer.

"We envision that KIM-1 will be useful in settings where the risk of kidney cancer is higher, such as patients undergoing abdominal CT scanning, where KIM-1 could be used to stratify risk of RCC," the authors wrote. "This will be particularly important given the rise of routine CT scans and the strong association between a number of CT scans and number of nephrectomies performed at the regional level in the U.S., indicating a substantial burden of overdiagnosis."

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