For this excursion, I attended a seminar hosted by the Bio Engineering Department on campus which featured a guest speaker named Daniela Valdez-Jasso, PhD who is an Associate Professor at the University of California San Diego. For some background information, she received her bachelor's degree in Applied Math and is a huge advocate for diversity especially in the Engineering field. To start off the seminar she provided everyone with a quick summary of what Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension is and that the mortality rate is worse for men even though women are prone to have a higher arterial pressure.

So, how does her lab study this? Well she injects rats with VEGF (Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor) and studies them over a course of weeks (approx. 23) Dr. Valdez-Jasso found that the animals that were sick, the males showed more resistance than the female rats.

"Some of these rats might not always generate diseases, there will still be changes but not the full blown way as other animals" -Dr. Valdez-Jasso

With the advanced pH used in her lab, compliance is rising and this stays for about 15 weeks then goes down. The large vessels tell her that there is more resistance and gives her better results. So by isolating those vessels, she can get a better look at those changes. Her mechanical testing to pressuring and stretching the vessels in order to figure out the rising stiffness they possess (it showed there was a higher stiffness). Th vessels that were in the control group, those collagen fibers were a bit shaky but in the disease group it was straighter. She also made sure to state that some cells are sex dependent and most of these studies do involve males and females. Growing these cells from both sexes under the same exact conditions, we can expect that the results will be different and/or more significant than the other. They observed that the model was able to detect the difference between the gene expressions found in males and females. Diseases are detected through the activity of the hearts before it starts to invade. As the seminar came to a close she thanked her team, funding, and more. Dr. Valdez-Jasso reiterated the importance of males and females in the studies and that the differences provide more information than many people believe.

Audience Questions

She replied saying that this was current work and estrogen is something they are beginning to look at more. They are already away of the interactions between those hormones and collagen as well as those reactions. Women to better if they are in the disease when they are pre-menopausal but even post-menopausal females do not share the same dangers and risks as males do.

Are you interested in incorporating other sex chromosomes?

She states that they try to go one chromosome at a time in order to properly research each component found. But they do have plans to do more of this, just in the future.

How old are the animals? Were there hormone changes due to their age?

They were about 6 weeks old and already in their respective reproductive phases during the experiment. But there is still uniqueness and that ties into the questions of how chromosomes and the experiment interact.

My Thoughts