When you think about brain disease research, you might not think of Wyoming. But in Jackson, across from a grocery store and a rafting company on Highway 89, a nonprofit lab is researching diseases like Alzheimer's and ALS. It’s called Brain Chemistry Labs. The team there is from all around the world, including England, Canada and Mexico.
The problems they’re tackling have real implications for the state. Both diseases disproportionately impact older populations, and Wyoming’s 65-and-over age group is growing rapidly.
Wyoming Public Radio’s Hannah Habermann stopped by the lab to hear about a blood test the team is working on to help detect ALS. Senior research scientist Rachael Dunlop took her on a tour to see a day in the life of a scientist.
Editor's Note: This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Rachael Dunlop: I've been here for nearly 10 years now and my PhD was in cell biology and obviously I don't have a Jackson accent. I'm from Sydney, Australia. The focus of my work here at the Brain Chemistry Labs is working on a diagnostic test to diagnose amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), sometimes known as Lou Gehrig's disease, in patients using a simple blood draw.
I am one of five scientists here, so we have a wide range of disciplines and we're working on a wide variety of projects.
RD: So you're sitting at my lab bench here in our lab in Jackson. We have lots of different machines that you may be able to hear, whirring and buzzing in the background.
Here at my bench, we are working on a process called PCR or polymerase chain reaction. This is a process where you can amplify DNA many, many hundreds of times over, so you can actually image it.
It was also the technology that was used during COVID. Many of us would've had a COVID test where a swab was taken from the inside of our nose, and then that was run through a machine to tell you if you had COVID or you didn't have COVID.
This bank of machines here, those are those machines. They're called qPCR, or real-time polymerase chain reaction machines, and they can take the tiniest amount of a human sample and amplify it many times over so that we're able to sequence it and determine what it means for a patient.
We receive blood samples here from many, many sources, primarily from the Centers for Disease Control. And with those we're able to analyze whether somebody has ALS or doesn't have ALS using this technique called PCR.
HH: What drew you to this lab as someone who you know is not from Jackson, not from Wyoming, not from the U.S.? What was the draw for you here?
RD: My expertise during my PhD was looking at age-related diseases, heart disease specifically, and trying to figure out why proteins build up in people's arteries.
They block the arteries and that can lead to a heart attack or a stroke. So I developed some precise techniques with my colleagues in Sydney to figure out why these proteins get sticky and build up and then don't get broken down.
That also applies to some of our neurodegenerative diseases, where we get these proteins building up and they can cause the cells to die. Then that causes a chain reaction effect where cells that are adjacent to that also die, and that can lead to the breakdown of neurons and then people get sick.
My training was in that. I was collaborating with Dr. Cox, who's our executive director here, and our colleagues here, and they eventually said, ‘We're doing so much work together, why don't you just come here?’
And so that's when I came to Jackson.
HH: What are some of the pros of working in a lab in a place like Jackson and in Wyoming and what are some of the complications that that brings up?
RD: You just have to look around outside here and there are not many cons, I've got to say.
But we do have some issues with the weather here in terms of getting consumables and supplies into our lab because we get a lot of storms and we've got the mountains. Sometimes we'll have items that are stuck over in Idaho Falls for days and days because they can't get over the pass. Just like us, actually, because I live over the pass.
But this is such a special place. Jackson is such a special place in terms of the beauty and the wilderness. It's so incredible and I find it really allows me to focus on my work a lot because I don't have many distractions in terms of at a big university, there's lots of buzz and hubbub.
We don't have that here, so we just come to work. We focus really hard and we get really good outcomes.
HH: Can we do a little tour of some of these random bits and bobs?
RD: We have lots of little trays here that contain tiny little tubes, which is where we put our samples in every day.
We have lots of little centrifuges that make lots of sounds when you spin plates. So we'll take a plate that we put in a machine and we'll spin it in one of these, and that's to make sure the samples are sitting nice and flat in the plate and they don't have any bubbles in them, for example.
Then we have another little, tiny centrifuge here that we use for our little tubes, [to] just spin down our samples. This has a thing in it called a rotor, which spins at 6,000 rotations per minute, and that will make sure that our samples are not stuck to the side of a tube. They get gently pushed down to the bottom of the tube, so we don't miss anything when we are doing an experiment.
Of course, I'm a scientist, so we have pipettes. And then we have four different PCR machines in this lab, which we use every single day, and sometimes they run overnight on weekends. They're very heavily used because we're running thousands and thousands of samples through this lab.
HH: Can we go take a look at the robot?
RD: This is actually a 3D printer that's been hacked to be a liquid-handling robot. So it allows us to do all of our pipetting preparing using a robot instead of a human, me.
I used to prepare all of these reactions, of which there were 384, by hand at my bench, and I started to go a little bit kooky, because it was very hard to concentrate on it. I would make mistakes. [This] means that there's no longer any human error involved in my experiments. This is fantastic for increasing the accuracy of our work and speeding up the process, as well.
HH: What are we watching happen right now?
RD: You can kind of hear the little whirring noises. This is a pipette head that is moving between the special tips that go on the pipette. It's picking up the samples from one plate, it's moving to my PCR plate where it's dispensing those samples, and then it's moving to another plate that has a special mix, like a recipe mix.
It's like making a cake a little bit, and then it puts that recipe mix into my PCR plate and mixes it up so that it's nice and homogenized. It does that 384 times.
HH: Will you tell me a little bit about where this test is at in terms of its availability, who's using it and how people are using it?
RD: It can currently take up to 12 months for a patient to get diagnosed with ALS. This leads to increased anxiety for them, but also it means people are not able to get onto drugs quickly, and the sooner you get treatment, the more likely it is to be effective.
Our test can return a positive or negative result in as little as a few days. This means patients can access treatments earlier when they're more effective.
So right now, this test is not available for patients. We are a discovery lab and we are still in the development stages, but we have advanced so far with this test now that we really need the help of a diagnostic company to come help us commercialize it, because our primary goal is to get this into the hands of patients and physicians as soon as possible.
