Heart disease is becoming more common today — what was once considered an elderly person’s disease today affects adolescents too. Scientists and clinicians have come to realise that many patients of heart disease and related problems have a set of traits such as a large waistline, high blood sugar and high blood pressure. These conditions are grouped under the term ‘metabolic syndrome’.
In India too, this syndrome affects a significant portion of the urban and rural population (up to 25%). Until recently, doctors treated the symptoms individually, and were not successful at this. There can be no hope for a unified treatment without identifying the starting point. Reports also hint that metabolic syndrome patients are more susceptible to cognitive decline, but this too is not well-understood. This makes the area interesting for scientists like Dr. Asha Abraham, Associate Professor at St. Aloysius College, Mangaluru.
Animal biotechnology
It is a field of applied biology where molecular biology, genome editing and other techniques are used for pharmaceutical, agricultural or industrial applications. Such research has given rise to genetically modified animals that synthesise useful proteins, have better growth rates or are resistant to disease. In Asha’s case, it is used to gather clues about metabolic syndrome.
The research
Since she cannot experiment on humans, Asha works with mice. To be suitable ‘models’ for metabolic syndrome, Asha needs to get her mice to develop the symptoms. The easiest way is to feed mice fatty food and wait for them to become unhealthy. However, Asha felt this was not realistic as most humans do not only consume fat. So she devised a high-fat-simple-carbohydrate diet for the mice that was more similar to diets followed by humans today. Simple carbohydrates are abundant in energy-dense junk food and sugar-rich items. These spike sugar levels as the body can easily break them down into glucose that accumulates in blood. This is less for complex carbohydrates like in whole grains and legumes.
Asha’s diet plan worked on her mice. They began to show metabolic-syndrome like symptoms. The mice are monitored and then eventually sacrificed so the protein and chemical levels in their brain can be measured with techniques like HPLC High-Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC). Through her experiments, Asha proved that neurotransmitter levels in sick mice get derailed by this diet and this is likely causing mice to over eat. This could be happening in humans, too.
Academic path
After a BSc in zoology, Asha chose to study the relatively new (at the time) subject of biotechnology at Cochin University of Science and Technology. She continued this with a Ph.D and then obtained a post-doctoral fellowship from the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR). She joined St Aloysius College as faculty after two years of research at the College of Fisheries in Mangaluru.
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