From scitechdaily.com
A researcher at Rice University discovers a critical piece of information in discarded data that redirects their research in the right direction
Regular dental check-ups could potentially alleviate joint pain. When Vicky Yao, a computational biologist from Rice University, discovered the presence of bacteria linked to periodontal disease in samples taken from individuals suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, she was not sure what to make of it.
Her discovery ignited a series of experiments that established a correlation between arthritis flare-ups and periodontitis. The research results have been published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
Tracing this connection between the two conditions could help develop therapies for rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune inflammatory disease that attacks the lining of the joints and can cause heart-, lung- and eye-problems. The approach that led to the study could prove fruitful in other disease contexts, such as cancer.
“Data gathered in experiments from living organisms or cells or tissue grown in Petri dishes is really important to confirm hypotheses, but, at the same time, this data perhaps holds more information than we are immediately able to derive from it,” Yao said.
Yao’s hunch was confirmed when she took a deeper look into data collected from rheumatoid arthritis patients by Dana Orange, an associate professor of clinical investigation and a rheumatologist, and Bob Darnell, a professor and attending physician at Rockefeller University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Yao was collaborating with Orange and others on a different project that tracked changes in gene expression during rheumatoid arthritis flare-ups.
“Orange, working with Darnell, collected data from arthritis patients at regular intervals while, at the same time, monitoring when the flares happened,” Yao said. “The idea was that perhaps by looking at this data retroactively, some pattern would become visible giving clues as to what might cause the arthritis to flare up.
“While I was working on that project, I went to this talk that I thought was really cool because it pointed out that in the data that gets ignored or thrown out, you can actually find traces of microbes. You’re looking at a human sample but you get a snapshot of the microbes floating around. I was intrigued by this.”
When she looked into it, Yao found that the germs in the samples that changed consistently across patients prior to flares were largely ones associated with gum disease.
“I was curious about this tool that allowed you to detect microbes in human samples. It was sort of like, for free, you’re getting an extra perspective on the data,” Yao said. “At the time, I hadn’t worked much on microbial data at all. Since then, Dana leveraged all this expertise and got together with people studying these bacteria.
“One of the things that came up when we were discussing this was, how cool would it be if you could prescribe some kind of mouthwash to help prevent rheumatoid arthritis flares.”
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