Washington University prides itself on its amount and diversity of research. The University has the fourth-largest funding portfolio from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and researchers work hard to develop and innovate for future generations. On the medical campus, there are a plethora of fascinating studies under way –– dealing with cannabis, mental health, and model mice. 

mRNA Mice 

Dr. Larissa Thackray, associate professor of infectious diseases and host of the “Let’s Meet the Virologists” podcast, specializes in using mouse models to look at viral infection. 

She works in the Diamond Lab, which participates in consortiums in different government branches like the NIH and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Currently, they are partnered with Moderna to look at the preclinical efficacy of mRNA vaccines.

“We were tasked to have mice available and ready that had gotten a primary series of vaccines… those mice were sitting around for if we got a new variant of concern that would suddenly arise,” she said. 

This happened with Omicron, for example — their lab was given isolates of the virus and made sure the vaccinated mouse model would work against those viruses. “We put it into vaccinated mice and ask, is the immune response good against that virus?” she commented.

These mouse models are used for other purposes as well. Recently, an intranasal COVID vaccine has been developed, and mouse models have shown that it’s effective as a booster.

The lab is also involved in some ongoing work: determining how Africa effectively contained COVID outbreaks, studying a potential persistent infection in the gut of long-COVID patients, and whether or not one should alternate arms when receiving vaccinations. 

Prenatal cannabis exposure 

The WashU Behavioral Research and Imaging Neurogenetics (BRAIN) lab has been utilizing data from large, open-source, longitudinal studies to assess risk factors for mental disorders. For a recent project, clinical science doctoral candidate Sarah Paul used data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, which followed nearly 12,000 children from ages 9-20.

Paul aimed to study prenatal cannabis exposure and its outcomes on children, and whether or not the timing of the exposure mattered. The research suggested that prenatal cannabis exposure was associated with higher risk for psychopathology later in the child’s life. “Cannabis use during pregnancy should be discouraged,” her paper read. 

“We are studying association, so there is nothing showing causal connection here,” associate professor Dr. Ryan Bogdan said. Cannabis may not be directly casual for the negative outcomes, but all factors taken together point toward the plausibility of causality.

“I think there’s this perception that cannabis is a natural thing, that it has no ill effects,” Bogdan continued. However, it’s plausible that cannabis has more detrimental impacts when consumed during different developmental periods

“We’re not advocating for people to not use cannabis ever when they’re pregnant,” Dr. David Baranger, a postdoctoral research associate, said. “[But] caution is warranted.”

“We’re already thinking about the next step of how to do this better,” Baranger continued. In order to obtain more controlled conclusions, they’ve begun to recruit pregnant cannabis users for the Healthy Brain Development Study, another longitudinal study. 

Mapping the brain 

Professor of genetics Dr. Ting Wang works on the human genome, specifically in the field of epigenetics. The Wang lab, made of about 25-30 people, has recently undertaken the $500 million Breeding Initiative Cell Atlas Network (BICAN) project from the NIH. 

The goal of the BICAN is really just to map the brain, but with better technology than has ever been available. “For the first time in the history of science, we have the ability to have a molecular profiling of the genome of the brain cells, all the different types of cells in the brain.”

Wang explained that experiments with the whole brain, or even a sub-region of the brain, requires averaging across thousands of cells. This has led to development of technologies that allow geneticists to see at a single-cell resolution. 

“The kind of data that we’re going to produce in this consortium is unprecedented. The amount is going to be way bigger than any other project,” Wang said. “We’re talking about hundreds of millions of cells.”

He mentioned that the kinds of questions this type of data can help address are broad. “We will have a better understanding of the heterogeneity or the diversity of a brain cell…When you go to a textbook you see one brain, but it doesn’t say the genetic background of that brain. But now we’re at a position where we have the capacity to address that,” Wang said. 

“We are [also] including nonhuman primates and other modern working organisms to understand the evolution of the brain, how we have some specific cell types and other animals don’t. How does that influence human specific traits? Where did that cell come from? We’ll be able to address some of these questions.

How can illness chance a voice? 

The School of Medicine has recently joined an NIH project called “Voice as a Biomarker of Health,” the goal of which is to diagnose patients solely based on the sound of their voice. Dr. Philip Payne, Chief Data Scientist for the School of Medicine, works on WashU’s end of the consortium.

Research has shown that voice diagnosis “works across a really broad spectrum from ascertaining who might have hypertension (high blood pressure), to identifying potential cancers (specifically head and neck region), to identifying early signs of neurodegeneration like Alzheimer’s disease,” Payne said. Through getting people with certain disorders to say set sentences, they can collect data about how illness can change the voice. 

“You could imagine in the future that you might have a video visit with your primary care provider, and instead of them having to have laboratory tests performed or some sort of follow-up…we’d be able to detect [problems] just from the recording of your voice during the interaction.”

This type of diagnosis would lend itself well to the recent shift to virtual care due to the pandemic.

Mental disorders are also within the scope of possibility, and voice diagnosis could help those unable to get the behavioral health help that they need. “The idea that we can expedite diagnosis to get people to the right care provider more quickly through voice recordings would be really powerful,” he said.

Payne compared it to when you can tell your friend is depressed on a phone call. “The reality is you as a human being are recognizing certain speaking patterns, intonation, tonal differences in people’s voice that may correlate with them being depressed. The question is, can we train a computer to recognize those same features?”