Getting to the heart of lupus-related risks: Prestigious grant funds innovative work

Shama Winston-Ford knows a lot about lupus, a disease that causes the immune system to attack healthy tissue. It often affects the skin, joints and internal organs. 

The Charleston mental health counselor not only lives with lupus but also helps others with the condition. “I'm a lupus facilitator for the state of South Carolina. So I put on lupus support groups in person and virtually. I'm also an ambassador with the Lupus Foundation of America,” Winston-Ford said.

 

But as knowledgeable as she is, Winston-Ford was shocked to hear that 18- to 44-year-old women with lupus have a risk of cardiovascular events, including heart attacks, strokes and heart failure, that is seven times higher than if they didn’t have lupus. 

“Wow,” she said. “That is definitely not widely known. When you think about lupus, you hear more about kidney issues and things of that nature.”

Justin Van Beusecum, Ph.D., an assistant professor at the Medical University of South Carolina, hopes not only to change that lack of awareness but also to reduce the risk of heart disease that young women with lupus face. His approach to exploring lupus-related complications struck a chord with the Lupus Research Alliance, which named him one of 11 recipients of this year’s Lupus Innovation Award. 

The two-year grants of up to $150,000 per year go to scientists working on “high-risk, high-reward projects that could transform how lupus is understood and treated,” according to a news release.

Van Beusecum’s lab will study the impact of a channel protein (a protein that lets substances into and out of cells) called Piezo1 on the heart, blood vessels and the brain. The goal is to find new, targeted treatments for people with lupus-related cardiovascular disease and neuropsychiatric lupus. Neuropsychiatric lupus means the disease has affected the brain, spinal cord and/or nerves. 

“We’re going to look at what Piezo1 is doing from a global perspective,” Van Beusecum said. “And we're going to use drugs that turn on the channel or turn off the channel. So how much activity is too much, and is turning it all the way off a bad thing? It's kind of the Goldilocks theory of medicine.”

Finding the sweet spot could have a significant impact on some of the estimated 1.5 million Americans, most of them women, who are living with lupus. 

Van Beusecum first realized the need for that after training in biophysics and mechanotransduction, a field that looks at how cells respond to factors in their environment. He was working with a cardiologist at Vanderbilt University.

 

“The doctor would come back in from seeing patients, and say, ‘Well, we just saw a 30-year-old woman who had a heart attack. And they did some diagnostic testing, and that's when she found out she had lupus.’” 

Heart attacks in women that young are rare. But Van Beusecum noticed that in women with lupus, they were less so. “It's a very strange cardiovascular phenomenon. Most women are protected during childbearing years because of estrogen. And then, once they’re past menopause, they run the same cardiovascular risk as males. But in lupus, it's the opposite. Younger women have a sevenfold risk of serious heart problems.”

Those women should not only be aware of that risk but also have new ways to reduce it, Van Beusecum said. “The goal would be in the next six to 10 years to maybe have this as a viable therapy for women who are at extreme risk for cardiovascular disease. Give them another option to reduce that risk, especially in childbearing years when stress is high.”

He wants women like Winston-Ford, the lupus ambassador, to live full lives. She’s lived to see her son graduate from college at the age of 19. “And he's going right into his master's. So his mother's heart has been very full,” she said.

If Van Beusecum and his colleagues succeed, the hearts of some other women with lupus might not only have the chance to be full but also healthier. “The number one thing women die from with lupus is cardiovascular disease,” he said.