UK researchers, with samples from patients, help map how heart muscle behaves; that could lead to new heart-disease treatments
By Lindsay Travis
University of Kentucky
A University of Kentucky researcher has helped solve a 60-year-old mystery about the human heart and published his findings in one of the world’s top scientific journals.
Kenneth S. Campbell, director of translational research in the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine in the UK College of Medicine, helped create a molecule-level map of an important type of heart tissue. The study was published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature earlier this month.
The heart has billions of cells. Each cell contains thousands of smaller structures that are the building blocks of muscle. In each block are hundreds of filaments of myosin, a motor protein. If the heart is a continent, Campbell and fellow researchers are looking at single strands of hair.
“Each filament has roughly 2,000 molecules arranged in a really complicated structure that scientists have been trying to understand for decades,” said Campbell. “We knew quite a lot about the individual molecules and people thought the myosins could be arranged in groups of six that were called crowns, but not much beyond that.”
Working with researchers at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, the UK researchers produced three-dimensional reconstructions of the cardiac filaments, provide=ing a new framework for interpreting structural, physiological and clinical observations.
Campbell said their most interesting discovery was that there are three different types of crowns. “We think this means that heart muscle can be controlled more precisely than we had realized,” he said. “We were also excited to see how myosin binding protein C, another protein that is linked to genetic heart disease, sits within the structure. It gives us a new level of information about how the molecules are arranged in the heart. . . . It gives us a much better understanding of how the molecules in our hearts interact.”
He said the study could help development of new drug therapies for heart disease, which is the leading cause of death in Kentucky, which among the top 10 states with the highest heart-disease death rate, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The research team collected heart samples from the 15-year-old Gill Cardiovascular Biorepository, of which Campbell is the director. Samples are donated for research purposes from patients who receive cardiovascular care at UK. “We’ve built a huge resource with roughly 15,000 samples from nearly 500 people,” Campbell said. “To the patients at UK HealthCare who’ve donated samples to us, we hope they know how much they’ve helped drive world-class research to, hopefully, help others who get sick.”
The samples are shared with researchers around the world, and “This study in Nature comes from one of those collaborations,” Campbell said.
Nature is a weekly international journal and is considered one of the most prestigious and widely respected scientific journals in the world. It covers a wide range of scientific disciplines and publishes original research, review articles, opinion pieces and news related to various fields of science.
“If you get a paper published in Nature, it means that scientists think that this work is important to everybody, not just people who specialize in that particular area,” said Campbell. “It’s a career highlight.”
Campbell, who holds a joint appointment in cardiovascular medicine and physiology, has taken an undergraduate degree in physics and transformed it into a career focused on helping people. “I used to care a lot about math and molecules,” he said. “But after hearing a friend who’s a cardiothoracic surgeon talk about patients, I realized I could take my scientific skills and do research that has a chance of helping people. It’s given my science purpose.”