Sniffing out disease: Doctor duo to take immunology research 'to a new level' in Augusta

The COVID-19 pandemic has focused unprecedented attention on the immune system as central to good health. Scientists tasked with creating a center devoted to it at Medical College of Georgia say the immune system is integral to combatting illness from cancer to heart disease. This includes groundbreaking and surprising work on how some immune cells can actually smell and react to other cells in both good ways and bad.

Drs. Klaus Ley and Lynn Hedrick, a husband-and-wife team from the prestigious La Jolla Institute for Immunology in California, will be coming to MCG at Augusta University to create a new Center for Immunology. It will include recruiting 20 researchers to aid in that effort and tie into existing initiatives like AU's effort to address inflammation and aging.

Immunology is now at the forefront of people's minds, Hedrick said.

"With COVID-19, people are really aware of the immune system and what it does to keep you healthy and how it can go awry," she said. "From the scientific perspective, the immune system is what keeps you healthy and it links to all of these other diseases: cancer, heart disease, neurological disorders, infectious disease."

Pass it on: Mom getting vaccinated protects babies from COVID-19

Their labs and the Center for Immunology will be housed in Georgia Cancer Center, where Hedrick will be collaborating with cancer immunologists on her ground-breaking work. Ley has recently made breakthroughs in atherosclerosis and heart disease and both doctors' work also has implications for COVID-19, said MCG Dean David Hess.

Those are currently the three leading causes of death "and they're going after all three of them," he said. "And immunology is at the center of all of them."

'A heyday of immunology'

Immunotherapy is keeping patients like former President Jimmy Carter alive despite cancer having reached his brain, Ley said. And because of the pandemic, you can now walk up to a stranger and have a conversation about herd immunity or antibody titers. Three years ago these terms weren't part of public discussion, he said.

"We are certainly in a wave and a heyday of immunology," Ley said.

Using the immune system to fight cancer is mirrored in efforts to combat heart disease and autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, he said. Many of those research efforts are already underway at MCG but the new center is a way to connect them and collaborate, Hedrick said.

"It’s a perfect time here scientifically to bring immunology in, put it at the center, and have it link and work very well with all of these other fantastic centers and departments that are already in place to bridge the gap and cross disciplines," she said.

Got severely ill from COVID? Genetics may have made that more likely, MCG researchers find

Patients at risk:COVID-19 has been deadly to cancer, transplant patients, but antibodies can offer 'shield'

AU and the cancer center already have outreach efforts in the Black community, which is important for their research, Hedrick said.

"I think they have been understudied," she said. While it is known there is a heavier burden of some diseases in the Black community, it is unclear how that happens with the immune system, Hedrick said.

"We need to know why," she said. "We need to understand that so we can help that population."

"There’s also health access issues and public health issues we need to be aware of and that are equally as important," Ley said. "Augusta University does a great job of reaching out to people and recruiting people" into studies.

There are other perplexing differences they are trying to understand, Ley said, such as why women fare better with COVID-19 and die at much lower rates than men.

Before menopause, women have much lower rates of heart disease, but after, seem to fare worse than men and by age 75, are caught up or have even higher rates, Ley said.

And some cancer immunotherapies work better in men than they do in women but it is not clear why, Hedrick said.

"There’s a lot of sex differences that need to be studied," Ley said.

A peek at the research to come

Among the research they are bringing to Augusta are recent breakthroughs in how immune cells work in heart disease and cancer by potentially smelling their targets.

In work published in Science last month, Ley showed how certain immune cells called macrophages have some of the same smell receptors found in the nose. Those receptors then help it hone in on a particular chemical target called octonal. While normally these cells attack and destroy things like bacteria, in this case, the damage may lead to atherosclerosis or hardening of the artery walls that leads to higher blood pressure.

"This macrophage is probably a bad actor and makes cardiovascular disease worse," Ley said. Of the 400 or so smell receptors in the nose, this immune cell has about 100 of them.

"There’s a lot of work that will follow from that discovery," Ley said.

"I think it has really opened a new area of research," Hedrick said.

For instance, she is looking at a particular type of immune cell called a monocyte that is involved in chasing down cancer cells that travel through the body looking to seed a new tumor in another part of the body. The smell receptors may be playing the same type of role there, although it is unclear yet how, Hedrick said. Some chemical is "tickling these receptors and making them active," which then sets the cell off to go find it, she said.

This particular immune cell is "good because it kills cancer and we think it may use some of these receptors to do it," Hedrick said. "But we don’t have those studies done yet and that is something I want to do here."

The researchers will likely begin in the fall and are eager to get to Augusta and begin recruiting. And, Hess said, their collaborators are eager for them to begin.

"They really are these Pro Bowl players who just take everything to a new level," he said, using a NFL analogy.

"There is so much enthusiasm here for people to work together and share ideas," Hedrick said. "It is the immunological mechanisms that weave through all of these diseases that is really going to be the link."