Science Cafe guest Anastasia Paulmann, M.D., is pioneering the use of the African Turquoise Killifish to reveal how the health and functionality of aging blood vessels can be maintained and enhanced. Thanks to its short lifespan, the fish is an emerging model for human health at MDI Bio Lab.
ATK, as the fish is called, is one of MDI Bio Lab’s growing colony of unique research animals. As with mice and other vertebrate models the fish shares much of its genetic blueprint with humans. But with a life span of months rather than years it offers researchers an accelerated view of how disease progresses over time, and the quick acquisition of biomolecular data on potential therapies.
Paulmann started her career as a clinician in nephrology. She was responsible for helping dialysis patients waiting for kidney transplants, as well as working on Covid-19 intensive care during the first phase of the epidemic. A graduate of the Hannover Medical School, she is doing her post-doctoral work at MDI Bio Lab in the research group of Laboratory President Hermann Haller, M.D.
Paulmann says that the move from bedside to the lab bench is inspiring her confidence in the coming revolution of personalized medicine, which is allowing therapies to be tailored, at the genetic level, to an individual patient’s clinical situation.
“We will be better able to help patients as individuals,” she says. “With people suffering from kidney failure, for instance, we should be able to precisely design the best techniques for transplantation or medication to make sure the benefits outweigh the risks.”
Paulmann’s most immediate work focuses on “rarefaction” of blood vessel systems – the veins, arteries and capillaries that make up our vasculature. Rarefaction is thought to contribute to a number of conditions associated with aging, as the vasculature loses functionality and become less pervasive in the tissues that it supports.
“I am comparing young and old fish: The young fish have a very dense net of vasculature and the old fish do not,” she says. “The question is, if we do certain interventions, can we keep up a youthful vasculature?”
Afternoon everyone welcome it’s exciting to see everyone for our first science Cafe of 2024 Happy New Year hope the new year is treating you well it’s been an exciting one here at the MDI biological laboratory already so we’re looking forward to a great season another season of our science Cafe is another
Wonderful uh series of opportunities to engage with all of you and share a little bit about some of the exciting science that’s happening uh not only at the MDI biological lab but around the world and that really uh brings us to our speaker this evening we are very
Excited to have Dr Anastasia palman with us um she is currently a postto in the laboratory of Dr Herman Hower who is also with us this evening and um she is uh currently um a student at Hanover Medical School in Hanover Germany and she’s as I mentioned doing her post-doctoral research fellowship with
Us here in Salsbury Cove so we are really really excited to have you with us Anastasia welcome yeah thank you very much sh welcome also to Dr Hower who’s uh going to join us as well Happy New Year wonderful so Anastasia I know um
You know a big part of the work that you are doing here at the MDI biological lab this year is really developing in many ways a new model to um help us understand aging and in particular aging of the vascular system which is interesting and something we don’t
Always think too too much about but um we’re excited I know you’re going to talk a little bit more about the details of your work with us but before we do that I thought maybe we’d like to just get to know a little bit more about you
And what brought you to mdibl kind of how you um became interested in in the work that you’re doing and I know Dr Hower um had a big part in that right and so I thought um Dr Hower if you might just pick us off by talking a
Little bit about um you know your mentoring why you as a nefrologist feel it’s important to um have you know students like Anastasia in your lab or or fellows like Anastasia in your lab and what what benefit does that bring to uh a physician why would you um you know
Want to do research like the kind that that Anastasia is doing as a nephologist yeah I’m happy to do that uh in fact Anastasia hopefully you have to ask her why she wants to do that but I can answer the question uh in more general terms uh you know the we have MD
Phds in Germany but uh the educational process is different in the two countries so in Germany you start in medical school and uh you first train and that’s the basis for becoming an MD PhD as a fellow and the fellowship is five years uh most uh most cases it’s more
Like six years and then you are a full-blown internist and nephologist and during that time you are doing mostly clinics you have been doing a thesis you have been working in the lab a little bit most of them during their studies actually before they started their fellowship and Anastasia
Has been working on endothelia cells oselia cell culturing questions of endothelia cell differentiation but then she became an excellent medical doctor she is one of the best doctors in the department and then a lot of fellows actually stay in clinical medicine but she kept her interest in research and basic research
And then she embarked on something imagin which is another three years at least for doing basic research so this means in Germany an mdphd is eight years in training and uh then you have an understanding of clinical medicine but also of the mechanisms of disease and
Then you go back and this is the basis for an academic career iny Anastasia when she will go back that’s the plan at the moment she will start her own lab she will build her own lab group and she will become a senior uh nephologist in one of the University
Hospitals in Germany and then start an independent career and then we can see her in a couple of years as an independent Department chief uh in Germany and running a large research group so this is what uh she is doing at the moment but now she has just started
She has started on a very adventurous Journey because it takes a lot of guts you are already an established clinical neologist I mean people consider you to be experienced uh you do biopsies you do ultrasound uh you counsel younger uh doctors and younger fellows and then you
Start at mdl in a lab and you start with methods and you start with a new animal model first you try not to make your patient survive but to make Kish survive and understand the 18 prots of Kish this is where we are at the moment and just one uh
More interesting fact is that all the German post dos in within the US system and there are quite a few of them at har there are more than 200 at the moment they are supported by the German government for a threeyear 4year period in a foreign country to
Learn and study and then come back and build the core of uh the chairman mdphd program so that’s the background this is what Anastasia is doing now so all of a sudden after being an educated fellow she is now a junior researcher at MDI that’s great so Anastasia as Dr
Hower mentioned um you didn’t exactly pick the easy path here right so you decided to um try to create a new research model which has in and of itself presented some challenges I think for for you but I’m wondering if you can start by just telling us a little bit
About this research model how you see it really having um the ability to give us some insights into how humans age because it doesn’t really initially you know we don’t necessarily think about studying fish to help us understand how human uh dise the human disease process so I’m excited to
Hear a little bit about that from you and then we can talk a little bit more about some of the specifics of your work but if you want to just jump in that would be great yeah thank you very much again for having me uh so my my name is
Anastasia pman and I’m a medical doctor from the Hanover University of medicine and I’ve started my work here at the mdibl now about half a year ago and I had the great opportunity to start basically not a new model cuz the fish I’m working with is maybe not the fish
You’re all familiar with the zebra fish but I’m working in the African Turkish killifish so if you hear me say the word word ATK this is our very short lovely abbreviation for our fish so we can say it very quickly so the ATK is a new animal model which we’re trying to
Develop as a canonical aging model and the good thing about this fish that um it basically does the Aging work for us so we don’t have to do anything with this fish it’s his natural lifespan that is very short and that helps us study it in the short amount of time that we’re
Trying to look into stuff so if you don’t mind I’m going to start uh sharing my screen and maybe start with a few slides just so everybody here who’s maybe not from a um research perspective also gets uh a nice introduction of what we do and how everything works so I hope
You all can see my screen screen and the presentation and as I mentioned today I want to talk about the African turkeys killifish and how this novel model helps us to study aging and especially for me since I’m interested in vascular aging so first off why do we need to study
Aging as you all have heard what is commonly known as the age pyramid is currently turning more into more into a rectangle shape so the problem is we get more and more people who are able to reach a longer a higher age but at the same time the healthy lifespan these people
Experience don’t grow at the same rate actually a lot of diseases are primarily age related so for example cardiovascular diseases like heart disease and of course for me very interesting kidney disease things like neurod degenerative diseases like Alzheimer for example or just things uh like macular degeneration which is one
Of the leading causes for blindness and all of these diseases B basically come down to aging so a lot of researchers out there are doing excellent aging research this is which is very a inspiring but a lot of This research is being done in either non vertebrae model
For example in the round worm sea Elegance or in the fruit fry um dropa on the other hand there are vertebra models like the mouse or the zebra fish uh that are being used and if you look at this you can see that um a lot of this animal
Mod um animal models are either being used here at the MDI or by our neighbors uh in the Jackson laboratory so um all of these models uh have benefits and they have um negatives so for example in fast aging animals like the roundworm or like dropa they don’t have certain aspects of
Aging like we have they have no bones they have no adaptive immune system and most importantly they don’t have the vasculature um on the other hand mouse or zebra fish doing aging research in those uh models that are typically more suited for developmental research takes very very long time so this is basically
Where the African turkey kilif fish comes in um this is a model uh organism that we established here at the MDI or was established around two years ago and that currently two labs are using so the the good thing about the killifish it’s it’s a vertebrae model model it has all
The important organs that especially for me I’m very interested in researching and it has this very short lifespan so while we can let it age very easily it’s easy to generate large cohorts of aged animals that are very similar to each other and um so a little
Bit about this fish it comes from Africa um and it lives in those what you can see little pools of water that during the dry season completely dry out so this fish has developed a method where it can spawn and reproduce very quickly um on the other hand his L short
Lifespan is basically just a tradeoff for the ability to grow up and mature very very quickly so of course as you can see a fish that comes from the south of Africa to establish that up here in Maine has had some challenges and this is as you can see just a schematic on
What has to be done or how the fish is spawned and made it and all of this plan or all those Seasons the fish goes through in nature we have to try to emulate in our lab when we do our research and the nice thing of course is
That this model closely resembles human aging so we can use it as a close correlate of course and one of the things I think is very interesting is you can actually I think while Anastasia is trying to repeat here the connection I mean what she actually wanted to tell
You and you can see this you can see that the fish age you can see that they lose color uh that they develop uh kyphosis uh that they lose muscle they are much thinner and the color loss uh is quite significant well Dr Hower I know
Um you know this is a we talked a little bit about the fact that starting this new model is a bit challenging and and I think part of it is the work that Anastasia and others in your lab are doing is is pretty new right this is the
Kind of there’s how many other groups would you say in the United States or in in the world that are using this model let me talk a little bit about some of the reasons that you all are so excited about um pursuing this work in in the
ATK model yeah um happy to do to do that so Anastasia already mentioned that uh the model was introduced by two groups um and uh at the moment uh it has been very nicely characterized in the beginning and uh then Anastasia is back yes I’m okay those are one of the joys of
Working in a older lab and the campus but I’m surprised that happens still so sorry sorry about that at at least the electricity is on so this is so when you we watch you well I just talked about the colors the colors of the fish that was
All all right so it wasn’t that far um I just wanted to mention that yeah uh the aging Hallmarks of the fish and then um I was mentioning that we are one of the um very few people who actually try to research kidney and Vascular biology in
This new model system so I wanted to ask if anybody has any questions up to that point Anastasia I don’t know if we really have said how long this fish lives what’s its lifespan so it’s uh lifespan typically is from four to six months in the model that we
Are using here which is the grz strain which is one of the shorter lifts there are also a little bit longer lift strain that usually lifts from 9 to 12 months um but we here uh have chosen the g z strain and this is good because this is
As mentioned the shortest lived one ones and it’s like the um model that was very first established so we have um basically all the resources we need we have a very well annotated genome we have uh proteome and transcriptomic Banks where we can look up all of our genes of
Interests fantastic so I we are not seeing your screen just so you know that in case you want to share it again yeah all right so let’s see I hope that now it works yes wonderful can you all see the presentation yes yes yes wonderful so um
Continuing on to that um one of the main theories we have about aging is this so-called vascular Theory of Aging basically what it says is that of all the possible causes for aging or all its drivers the phenotype you get from aging a lot of the diseases that come uh out
With aging are being driven by vascular aging so this is like a common trunk of a lot of diseases that we later on see and this kind of correlates to what you can basically see uh and what you can measure um for example hypertension is a disease that
Also comes with aging because of the increase of arterial stiffness for example but if we look at vascular not only as just the big arteries or the big veins but there’s Al actually a very small um mesh work which is the microvasculature and during the Aging the M the
Microvasculature becomes less dense and we call this process U microvascular rare affection so there have been some studies that have been trying to quantify this phenomen and see if it can actually be reversed so what could have uh what was shown was that microvascular disease once we reduce the amount
Basically of Aging we see all of the different organs in our body become healthier and that also leads to less like osteoporosis it leads to less loss of muscle it leads to hopefully less tumor burden and um so forth so one of this ideas is that this is basically
Driven by one of the larger systems molecular pathway of wedf and this is basically what we are trying to research is to see how does v jef affect the microvasculature in this fish and are there other ways by which we can influence this system and basically our idea is if
Aging is a forward process to less uh blood vessels can we reverse the Pro uh process for example by trying to give like an anti-aging drug and the complex we are interested in researching is the so-called sglt2 Inhibitors so this is a class of drugs that was basically a Blockbuster in uh
The past years it’s a drug that is being developed from apple tree bark uh the grand molecule is being called Florin and we use the molecule called dagin which is already a very established medication in nefrology in cardiology and the studies in humans that have been done with this
Substance um show that it has a very extensive health benefit even though what it’s interesting we don’t exactly know where this benefit is coming from so what this drug does is it inhibits the sgt2 transporter which is basically a transporter that is solely located in a certain part of the kidney a so-called
Proximal tubu but even though we just reduce the activity of this one transporter we can see all of this p Tropic effects on the heart on the liver on the fat mass and also on the lifespan of all of our patients um this was originally designed as an anti-diabetic
Drug um so it’s basically been used for type 2 diabetes and in the past years we have been using it more and more primarily um in kidney and sufficiency and for heart failure and once again it’s very interesting for us how is this process regulated or how is this
Developed so one of our hypothesis is that this drug May intervene with the um microvascular rare affection with aging and this is something we are trying to research here so of course all of this research cannot be done with a big lab and uh thankfully here I have the
Opportunity un to do this research in the holler lab and um I’m very grateful for everybody who is helping us Perform This research and gather our data and I would be very happy uh to answer all of your questions and maybe get into some more detail Anastasia thank you so much that
Was a great overview of of the work I’m sure our audience has a number of questions but I was really struck by this comment that you made about these sglt2 Inhibitors being found in apple tree bark that’s really fascinating do do you have any more information on how that came about that’s really
Interesting yeah so um the mother substance which is Florin has been known for many many years already it was uh used as a drug early in the 80s and after that I think in the early 90s it was developed as the drug group of the glyph sense which is like the common
Name of all these drugs that we are using right now and early on there have been studies that were first trying to show its anti-diabetic effect and the interesting thing is that nowadays it’s just not good enough for a drug to lower your blood sugar I mean there’s many
Drugs who can do do this and in the past there have been drugs that did lower your blood sugar but that had severe side effect in humans so nowadays if you want to um like pursue your drug interest you don’t you have to show that your drug is safe in a c
Cardiovascular setting so a lot of these studies on the glyph sin showed that not only were they safe but they were actually a able to um like continuously have a beneficial effect on the people that were taking it they had less albuminuria which is like a sign that
Your kidney is basically leaky and not working well they had a very well stabilized kidney functions over many years which hasn’t been shown for a very long time in other medication and then of course um this was for the field of nefrology and then of course cardiologists discovered that it’s a
Very um good drug that helps additionally for heart failure to all of the drugs that we are using up until now so it’s not only like uh let’s say wonder drug that helps us um help our patients but it also helps in the context with all of the other drugs and
Medications that we have been using and I think that’s very exciting that we’re like um progressing research and we are able to find more and more mechanisms that all help um to heal our patients yes that’s fascinating so there are a couple of questions in the chat
And I would just remind everyone if you have a question you can feel free to use the raised hand feature in Zoom you can type it in the chat or you can just take yourself off mute if you’d like to to jump in and ask but Anastasia one
Question in the chat is is um really asking more about the fish and sort of how do you actually obtain these fish from Africa yes so um we the first grz strand basically was collected in the early 70s 80s and there have been several collections so there are some
Universities that go um out and collect every year basically the wild bread uh strand that they’re using um but our fish are usually um developed by other either research institutes or we order them and they basically um this is the nice thing about this fish we don’t ship
The fish but because the uh killifish has this mechanism we call it the diap PA so the fish can lay its egg and that a has certain mechanisms in place that protect it from drying out actually a lot of those mechanisms were uh studied earlier in the um biolab here in the
Atlantic hilly fish that basically can be fished just outside of my lab and basically those desiccation mechanisms protect the embryo from drying out and the African Turkish kilif fish embryo is able to survive up from several months to several years even being completely out of the water being in a dry face and
Um without it actually harming the longevity or the lifespan of the actual fish so it’s like some additional months or years that you can give to this fish and we basically transported into our lab in this uh dry stage and once it arrives here we can basically just add
Some water and then we have a fish so um on that maybe a little anecdote in the early 70s um the company that later developed the frisbey and the sea monkeys they actually started out the company by trying to make instant fish so like you have the eggs and then you
Put them in water and then you get fish so they were trying to Market that foot children and it was like a multi-million dollar industry and then they discovered something we discovered here in the lab too it doesn’t work it’s not unfortunately not as easy as it sounds
It’s uh we’re sometimes here surprised ourselves how this fish survives in the wild without us taking care of it but it works so it takes like I mentioned a lot of time to get them actually to the point where we can use them as a really good model for research because we of
Course need certain numbers for that that’s great Dr Boer you have a question I think I think you’re muted can you hear me now yes yes you you also had the liver uh listed on your diagram and I’m wondering what the effects of this drug are are on the
Liver is it fatty liver disease that’s primarily the focus there yes so what we think this drug does is something that’s similar for example for something that’s been shown for metformin it’s a drug that basically stimulates the fasting state so you can think of it as fasting
In pill form so of course if you have diseases that associated with um a turn on of metabolic activity be it diabetes 2 be it null alcoholic fatty liver disease all those diseases that usually would benefit from fasting could benefit from the sg22 inhibition as well the
Theories behind that of course is being that this drug might change how the nutrient sensing of our body is affected um it basically switches the metabolism um in our cells from using glucose to hopefully being able to use more Ketone bodies so this is one of the
Ideas we are also trying to pursue and see if this drug is also similar to what we have seen in dietary restriction for example thank you very interesting fascinating so Anastasia we do have a question in the chat about the name the drug and whether or not you’ve seen any effects on cognitive
Function so um the funny thing with the fish is they do show signs of neurod degeneration there is some um Behavior behavioral tests you can do on those fish to show that they actually experience memory loss over time um we have started um establishing the model
Of our drug very recently so to say so the fish I have now are I would say like in their human years in their 50s 60s and it will be very interesting to see how the behavior of those fish is like once they hit the actual old lifespan that we are interested
In and for the effect of cognitive function in this drug I believe there’s even some preliminary data in humans that have been able to show that this drug actually might have an effect so once again we don’t know exactly what the mechanism of that might be interesting so one more question that we
Have here is um how might interstitial fluid and the newly discovered interstitium vessels that carry the fluid impact vascular aging so I think what Steve means with the question is basically what is between the vasculature or like let’s say between all the different kinds of cells which um as we sometimes call it
Is like the third space so you have what is inside the cells and you have what the liquid inside your uh blood vessels and then there’s like this imaginary basically third space where you have the extra um intertial fluids um so one of the idea is that that um the blood vessels they’re
Supposed to be leaky only until a certain point so you want a like a diffusion of molecules Like Oxygen and of course you want to take away all the um CO2 um that which has been um made up by the muscle for example um and of course we know that this um basic
Homeostasis of the vest mascul can be affected by wedf so wedf was one of those mules I showed you earlier which basically stands for vascular endothelial growth factor and one basically of the side effects this drug uh this molecule has is not only does it help um little arteries to form and to
Grow but it makes them um more penetrable to fluids so like if one of our ideas is how this drug might affect the system we’re of course hoping that it might make the um vasculature more stable so hopefully less leaky but that for now is
More of a hypothesis and we have to see if uh our ideas work out as we think fascinating any other question questions for Anastasia from the audience Anastasia one one thing I am curious about you know I know you you’ve talked a little bit about how your experience as a physician and treating
Patients um really kind of Drew you to the to the research side this idea of personalized medicine can you talk a little bit about you know why you see that as um really important in the work that you’re doing in the clinic and how those two things connect for you here so
For me for example it was very interested I studied my work at uh as a nephologist as a fellow in 2017 uh with my Department chief being Professor holler and of course all of my like very young career I always saw that medical doctors performing be it
Clinical research or be it um more basic research and I was always fascinated by um the fact that you can pursue as a doctor your own questions and you can pursue those questions basically in interest of your work and in interest of your patients because we have a lot of
Patients that when we talk to one of the things they ask us well why me why does this happen to me or for example like um if if you see patients on dialysis and you see somebody ages 10 years and six months and somebody else doesn’t you of
Course ask yourself well why is it why why is this mechanism working that way and I found it very fascinating to be able um and to learn how to investigate those basically myself and I think it also helps us to drive basically the knowledge um because of course I have
More experience seeing how uh we work here with uh other PhD with like basic researchers um what actually impacts let’s say our patients lives so I always find it very very interesting doing the interdisciplinary work that we can do here and I know our colleagues or my
Colleagues enjoy it too and for example just like how to read a paper is so different from somebody with a let’s say basic research background to how I as a medical doctor would view it so we always have very interesting conversations about that that’s great and Dr Hower I I’ll
Throw this over to you because I know this is a traditional strength of the MDI biological laboratory this idea of bringing uh basic researchers together with um clinicians with Physicians and I’m just curious as someone who has benefited I think from that or certainly followed that model throughout your
Career do you see that as something that will continue I mean is that a continued need going forward just in general is there a specific role that you see mdibl playing in in that Arena well obviously we have been doing this uh and we have examples here uh
Liver doctors who have been doing basic research at MDI and taking care of patients all their lives to be honest I think that uh the best academic Physicians are the ones uh who are doing basic research and are taking care of patients uh as Anastasia just mentioned
Uh one without the other is only half of the picture so yes I think that MDI has been doing this and will keep doing this we all know it’s challenging not only in when you come from Germany but also in the US however I think we are becoming better Anastasia has joined
The lab at a moment when she’s not only working together with researchers at mdibl but also at the Jackson laboratory so Anastasia how many young people are sitting around in our kidney meetings now from the tax from mdibl these are numbers and an enthusiasm which we hadn’t had in
Years yeah I think so too like many I would say we are like 30 40 people right now and every time we meet the Consortium grows and I think it’s very interesting to like also set up all the collaborations that are possible here here so um like the necessity of being
Able to see what is required in the clinic and how to translate that basically back from the bedside to the bench I think is very interesting as the same way going back around so I think all those questions really help um us to establish hopefully the MDI in the
Future as well and to call collaborate a lot more and just to add we are role models I mean I can see this every summer I can see this with our graduate students I mean we are models not only for a PhD career or working doing basic uh research but
Also being a medical doctor at the same time so that you’re able to talk about patients and to talk about both World there are disadvantages obviously I mean when you are a real PhD PhD you are more experienced you’re better with methods uh so there is a payoff but I’ve been
Sitting on the fence all my life and I’ve been enjoying that aesia can I ask you another question about the fish um you showed the atrophy of the vasculature uh I I don’t know whether that was from the fish or not can you make such a measurement in the fish
That’s what we’re trying to establish right now the measurement usually um from the study I have shown you um was performed in mice the nice thing about a model like the mouse that has been established for many many decades is of course a lot of research is tailored
Toward those let’s say the typical or the canonical research models so one thing for example you have antibodies for every protein in mice it’s different in the killifish um so for for the killifish I’m I’m sure you have some experience in that um for right now um
It’s a very new model it has been around maybe more on voke in the past five years which is a very short time in research so and seeing how nobody before us actually tried um to research those type of questions we are setting up basically how to investigate our
Questions because right now we are basically the first ones that have to look into endothelial cells of ATK there’s like a thousand ways to look in endothelial cells and all the other mechanisms but to see this in our fish is right now one of the things that I’m
Working on can you use the new microscope to to look at the vasculature of course so um as some of you may know we have a amazing microscope facility here at the mdibl and one of the bigger microscopes or one of the newer fancier microscopes is of course the light sheet
Microscopy that we have here um so for me right now before using the light sheet microscopy and setting up all the me methods we also have microscopes that allow me basically to make very fast High um put through trials of the antibodies that we’re trying to do and
And um I’m able to generate basically old fish very quickly I can stain those with the various particles that we are looking at and then we can image them and quantify basically within one day so this is I think a very nice nice things that I’m currently spending my time on doing
Yeah Anastasia as you kind of look to the Future and and your career career as a physician do you think you’ll continue to do basic research do you think you’ll continue to study ATK or will you maybe move into another model yeah so I’m I’m of course very enthusiastic about my
Model so for me you have to think a little bit um I think it’s very difficult in the field of medicine and probably in the field of research to find let’s call it a small Niche like how our cells also look for a niche I think it’s very important to find a
Place where um you love your work you’re interested and you can maintain it for a long time so I know that of course working in a new animal model for others may present huge burdens and of course it’s very difficult to establish but as Professor holla mentioned I’m kind of
Settled so um all I have is effort and time so that that is good and I’m very motivated to be one of the driving factors hopefully in this animal model and especially in the field I’m interested in um I had the great opportunity last year to visit um
Conferences on of course on nephology and on vascular um biology and aging and um the African Turkish killifish surprisingly hasn’t really found found its way into vascular research yet and I would be very happy to be one of the first people to introduce this model
There and as you can see I’m also very ambitious so that and and we are you know I mean Anastasia has started this work and uh before we move on I’d like to mention Eric Eric Roches who started the research and then also with the support of the Morris family because when we
Started the killifish this was tried we we needed extra support for that and this was provided by wiar and Martha but thinking about the future I know that Anastasia is working now for the next years at MDI but we are more than happy to have her back as a visiting scientist
In 10 or 15 years uh and uh to support her work on basketball she in killifish for the foreseeable future you know that’s the price of admission Anastasia you never get to leave MDI once that’s okay it’s like I will send all my grad students here so they would want to
Apply if I if I may I I know this is a little bit private but Anastasia I think it’s important for our listeners you’re living on campus I mean you’re one of the people changing our campus so you’re living in one of the colleages with your
Husband and the dog so you can actually see Anastasia in the morning walking the dog very early on different campus life than we had before in January yes I’m very very grateful for that so um like this opportunity that I can come here and I like basically I arrived I started doing the
Work and not having to look for an apartment here on the island or anywhere close I think is a huge help and of course for me it’s also very good to have of course my family with me as a supportive system because as Professor holla mentioned coming from a well
Established well I’m a finished doctor in Germany here and starting new wasn’t always very easy and of course having somebody with me who helps me and a little bit of work life balance so I can spend maybe just 10 12 hours in the lab ASO helps well Anastasia it’s been such a
Delight to hear a little bit about the work that you’re doing we’re so excited to see where this work leads I hope you’ll come back and give us some updates on how it’s going I know um I I know it’s it’s been a challenge but also I hope very rewarding
And we appreciate you’re spending some time with us this evening and it’s fun for us to be a little bit um part of your journey and uh again thank you so much for for sharing uh your work with us so thanks to all of you as well um Dr
Hower mentioned you know the importance of funding in keeping uh research programs like Anastasia’s up and running you know certainly building out our um graduate and professional education programs has been a huge huge priority for us over the last year and I think you can see tonight um why that is so
Important and so we’re grateful to all of you who have supported those Endeavors and look forward to sharing more about more of the stories of these outstanding young people who are now here in a vibrant part of the MDI research Enterprise so thank you so much
For that just a quick reminder that next science Cafe will be February 12th and that will feature another mdibl U scientist Dr Helena shabata she’s relatively new to the laboratory and so we encourage you to tune in learn a bit more about her work uh she is
Really looking at how the genome is regulated and how that sometimes when things go arai how that leads to specific diseases um things like dyslexia things like um diabetes all these muscular very rare uh disorders but just a wonderful opportunity to learn a bit more about how these model
Organisms she is using the fruit fly um so another you know important organism in research and so we invite you to tune in with us we’ll have a Wonder another wonderful conversation and again our thanks to all of you for your support of these science cafes It’s a Wonderful way
To engage in in conversations about the science that really uh impacts our lives so thanks you all so much and we look forward to seeing you next month thank you thank you thank you very much it was very fun thanks for having thank you