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Jalees Rehman

@jalees.bsky.social

1.8K followers 810 following 510 posts

Head, Dept of Biochemistry & Molecular Genetics, Univ of Illinois, College of Medicine: cell biology, vascular biology, genomics, computational biology, immunology, regeneration, neuroscience; https://chicago.medicine.uic.edu/bmg/profiles/rehman-jalees/

chicago.medicine.uic.edu

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Reposted by Jalees Rehman

The Conversation U.S. @us.theconversation.com · Aug 10

Vaccines don’t just prevent deadly and dangerous diseases like measles, polio and COVID-19.

A new study found that people who got the shingles vaccine had a 20% lower risk of developing dementia. buff.ly/5p4z5NS By Anand Kumar and @jalees.bsky.social @uicdom.bsky.social #VaccinesWork 🩺

Vaccines hold tantalizing promise in the fight against dementia

A prominent Nature study and related research raise the possibility that vaccines may have a broader role in experimental therapeutics outside the realm of infectious diseases.

Jalees Rehman @jalees.bsky.social · Jul 1

Grateful for thoughtful News and Views by
@cancercachexia.bsky.social pioneers @teresazimmers.bsky.social and Denis Guttridge
nature.com/articles/s43... on our paper nature.com/articles/s43...
@natcancer.nature.com - highlights need for cross-disciplinary approaches to tackle #cancer #cachexia

Vascular collapse leads to muscle wasting in cancer cachexia - Nature Cancer

Muscle atrophy in cachexia drives weight loss and represents a major complication for patients with cancer. The tumor-derived cytokine activin A is now shown to decrease endothelial cell viability in ...

Reposted by Jalees Rehman

Nature Cancer @natcancer.nature.com · Jun 4

📢Article now online at Nature Cancer!

'Skeletal muscle endothelial dysfunction through the activin A–PGC1α axis drives progression of cancer cachexia'

✏️By Young-Mee Kim, Jalees Rehman and colleagues

🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Skeletal muscle endothelial dysfunction through the activin A–PGC1α axis drives progression of cancer cachexia - Nature Cancer

Using multiple in vivo mouse models, Rehman and colleagues report that tumor-induced impairments in the muscle vasculature mediated by circulating activin A contribute to cachexia development during c...

Jalees Rehman @jalees.bsky.social · May 29

It was a tremendous privilege to work on this important research project with Young-Mee Kim. This project took more than 5 years to complete but we hope that in some small way, it will contribute to improving the health of cancer survivors.

Jalees Rehman @jalees.bsky.social · May 29

Furthermore, Activin-A and other tumor factors could be similarly causing problems in other organs beyond the muscles by impairing the function of additional blood vessels.

Jalees Rehman @jalees.bsky.social · May 29

This raises a broader question about cardiovascular or - more specifically - vascular health in cancer patients. Ensuring vascular health early on, even during the treatment of the cancer, could be very important for the preservation of muscle function.

Jalees Rehman @jalees.bsky.social · May 29

Our discovery adds to the body of literature on muscle loss, cachexia, muscle fatigue in cancer survivors. We do not think that blood vessel dysfunction is the only cause of muscle issues in cancer, but it is one contributor that can be treated.

Jalees Rehman @jalees.bsky.social · May 29

The good news is that we could prevent this by targeting Activin-A with an antibody. We also found that Activin-A suppresses the PGC1-alpha pathway in blood vessel endothelial cells. Gene therapy to upregulate PGC1-alpha in the blood vessels reversed the muscle loss!

Jalees Rehman @jalees.bsky.social · May 29

One of the primary negative effects of Activin-A is the reduction of the number of functional blood vessels in the skeletal muscle

Jalees Rehman @jalees.bsky.social · May 29

Through extensive molecular studies, we found that the molecule Activin-A is released into the blood by tumors, and this factor sets in motion a cascade of molecular signals in the blood vessel endothelial cells

Jalees Rehman @jalees.bsky.social · May 29

This suggested that blood vessel problems in the muscle appear first, even during earlier stages of the tumor, and may actually cause worsening of the muscle loss.

Jalees Rehman @jalees.bsky.social · May 29

In the mouse studies, we were able to perform a time experiment and we saw the the blood vessels in the muscles of mice bearing tumors showed a reduction of blood vessels in the muscle, and a loss of normal blood vessel function BEFORE muscle loss

Jalees Rehman @jalees.bsky.social · May 29

The loss of blood vessels in the human muscles did not allow us to address what happened first. Did the cancer patients first lose their muscle mass, and then the muscle blood vessels wither away? Or did the blood vessel loss come first and actually make muscle loss worse?

Jalees Rehman @jalees.bsky.social · May 29

We therefore specifically looked at the blood vessels in the muscles. Muscles of patients with cancer had reduced blood vessels, even when the tumor was far away from the muscles. The same was true for multiple mouse models of cancer.

Jalees Rehman @jalees.bsky.social · May 29

Blood vessels supply nutrients and oxygen to all tissues - including muscles. Blood vessels also seem to do more than just serve as a supply pipeline, they appear to send signals or cues to various organs and tissues, and facilitate their regeneration

Jalees Rehman @jalees.bsky.social · May 29

We wondered whether the tumors cause changes in the muscles which make it difficult for exercise and increased nutrition to work. This would explain why many cancer survivors have such a difficult time regaining their strength and building muscle mass

Jalees Rehman @jalees.bsky.social · May 29

One of the biggest challenges that many cancer survivors face is the loss of muscle mass (cachexia) which emerges during the cancer, and often persists even after successful cancer treatment. For many survivors, attempts to increase food intake or exercise does not suffice

Jalees Rehman @jalees.bsky.social · May 29

During the past couple of decades, new cancer treatments have substantially improved survival of #cancer patients. These successes now have to be accompanied by approaches to improve the #healthspan and quality of life of cancer survivors.

Jalees Rehman @jalees.bsky.social · May 29

Thrilled to share this publication from our lab on muscle wasting in #Cancer and #vascularbiology, spearheaded by Young-Mee Kim in @natcancer.nature.com
nature.com/articles/s43.... Bluetorial on #cachexia, #cancer, #cardiovascular health
@uicancercenter.bsky.social @uofilsystem.bsky.social

Skeletal muscle endothelial dysfunction through the activin A–PGC1α axis drives progression of cancer cachexia - Nature Cancer

Using multiple in vivo mouse models, Rehman and colleagues report that tumor-induced impairments in the muscle vasculature mediated by circulating activin A contribute to cachexia development during c...

Jalees Rehman @jalees.bsky.social · May 26

Thank you for sharing it!

Reposted by Jalees Rehman

Mark Sanborn @sanbomics.bsky.social · Feb 24

Senescent cells contribute to disease and are found in many tissues but are hard to analyze because markers have been derived in culture and do not account for cell-type differences. Here, we define new signatures based on millions of single cells (1/5) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Unveiling the cell-type-specific landscape of cellular senescence through single-cell transcriptomics using SenePy - Nature Communications

Senescent cells accumulate in tissues with aging and disease but are difficult to detect due to distinct cell-type-specific senescence phenotypes. Here, the authors present the SenePy algorithm to ide...

Jalees Rehman @jalees.bsky.social · Jan 3

Analysis of multi-condition single-cell data with latent embedding multivariate regression

www.nature.com/articles/s41... [email protected] @wkhuber.bsky.social in @naturegenet.bsky.social

LEMUR Github: github.com/const-ae/lemur

pyLEMUR: github.com/const-ae/pyL...

Analysis of multi-condition single-cell data with latent embedding multivariate regression - Nature Genetics

Latent embedding multivariate regression models multi-condition single-cell RNA-seq using a continuous latent space, enabling data integration, per-cell gene expression prediction and clustering-free ...

Jalees Rehman @jalees.bsky.social · Jan 3

Multiome Perturb-seq unlocks scalable discovery of integrated perturbation effects on the transcriptome and epigenome

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Multiome Perturb-seq unlocks scalable discovery of integrated perturbation effects on the transcriptome and epigenome

Single-cell CRISPR screens link genetic perturbations to transcriptional states, but high-throughput methods connecting these induced changes to their…

www.sciencedirect.com

Jalees Rehman @jalees.bsky.social · Jan 3

Best practices for differential accessibility analysis in single-cell epigenomics

www.nature.com/articles/s41... @naturecomms.bsky.social

Best practices for differential accessibility analysis in single-cell epigenomics - Nature Communications

The authors conduct a comprehensive assessment of statistical methods for identifying differentially accessible (DA) regions in scATAC-seq data, using a compendium of scATAC-seq experiments paired wit...

Jalees Rehman @jalees.bsky.social · Dec 20

TurboCas: A method for locus-specific labeling of genomic regions and isolating their associated protein interactome

www.cell.com/molecular-ce...