Fr. Ted Said…Cultivating Hope, Part 4: Glynnis Garry Bann, M.D. '11

Topic: Glynnis Garry Bann, ’11 B.A., M.D.

In his inaugural address, University President Rev. Robert A. Dowd, C.S.C., called us to be “sustainers of hope and builders of bridges.” But in a world where optimism often feels in short supply, where do we find the inspiration to keep nurturing the good? Plant those seeds through a revitalizing experience where you can pause, exhale, and allow your spirit to blossom. Come hear this calling echo in powerful, personal stories from Notre Dame alumni and faculty who are living examples of what it means to cultivate hope—just like Fr. Ted.

Speaker:

• Glynnis Garry Bann, ’11 B.A., M.D., Jr. ’76, Assistant Professor, Principal Investigator, Departments of Internal Medicine and Molecular Biology at UT Southwestern Medical Center

Dr. Glynnis Garry Bann, ’11 B.A., M.D. is a cardiovascular physician-scientist developing new therapies for heart failure. In addition to caring for patients with cardiovascular disease, she studies how the heart can repair itself after injury. Her laboratory has discovered a single protein capable of converting scar cells into healthy, beating heart cells after a heart attack, with the goal of preventing heart failure. Dr. Bann earned her degrees from the University of Notre Dame (’11 B.A.) and Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, and completed residency and advanced cardiovascular and postdoctoral fellowships at UT Southwestern. She is currently on faculty at UT Southwestern, where she leads an NIH-funded laboratory focused on discovering molecular therapies for the treatment of cardiovascular disease.

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Transcript

Speaker 12 0:00

It's an evolving world, and it's always a larger world each year, and it's a world with increasingly complicated problems. But that's why we have universities. We stay on the brink of knowledge and push it forward, and I think we, we extend the frontiers of, frontiers of our learning and our possibility of changing the world, if you will, or evolving the world. I think universities are places of great hope. They're not something to just continue the status quo, but tell young people they can have their own dreams and vistas of a better future and work towards that with competence.

Juliana 0:40

Please welcome Glynis Gary-Band, MD, of the class of 2011, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Internal Medicine and a member of the Division of Cardiology at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, Texas

Glynnis 1:06

We all inherit things from our families, our faith, our values, the way we laugh, the food that we eat. Some of the things that we inherit, we choose to carry forward with us, and some of the things that we inherit, we don't know that we're carrying at all. One of the things that was passed down to me was Notre Dame. Every summer from when I was two until I was twenty-five, my grandfather, Mike Gary, class of nineteen forty-five, would gather his eight children and thirty-some grandchildren, and he would bring us to campus every year for a week. We stayed in Alumni Family Hall, and with all of the charms of dorm living that I'm sure you can all imagine, it was absolutely perfect. Like many of you, Notre Dame was not just a place that I went to college. It is home. It's where I learned how to ride a bike, where I learned how to fish, where I learned how to pray in the grotto. But we don't just pass down our faith and our values and our love of a place. We also pass down our DNA. I never met my grandmother. She died at fifty-eight from heart failure. She had a genetic condition called familial hypercholesterolemia, which is a genetic mutation in her DNA that causes extraordinarily high levels of cholesterol, and that leads to heart attacks and heart failure within the second and third decade of life. She left behind her a family with her mutation, and in my family alone, there's over five generations and nearly a dozen relatives affected. In her lifetime, there were no drugs to treat this condition. But in fact, the year that she died, the first statin drug came to market, and that was one of the most consequential medical breakthroughs of the twentieth century. Because of statin drugs, they were able to lower my family's cholesterol enough in order to prolong survival of an entire side of my family tree. But the science didn't just stop there. Just this month, researchers published the first-ever gene editing of a cholesterol pathway in humans that allows for a single treatment to permanently lower cholesterol. Take that in. My family's disease cured in my lifetime. I think something has shifted in medicine that we really don't talk about enough. When I was a medical student, we often talked about managing disease, that we could slow it down and try and control it. We thought it was often, you know, a little ridiculous to say, "We can cure this," but we say that now. Children with sickle cell disease are being cured with a single gene therapy. Hepatitis C is now eliminated after eight weeks with a pill. Cancers that were death sentences fifteen years ago are now being survived with for decades. The medicine that really seemed like far-off, futuristic kind of care is now, in many cases, the standard of care. We are living in one of the greatest eras of biomedical discovery, and the work that we're doing in laboratories right now is what the next generation will inherit I'm a cardiovascular physician scientist, so that means I treat patients with heart failure in the hospital, but then I also run a research laboratory that asks a very fundamental question: Can we teach the human heart to heal itself? Heart failure kills more people than all cancers combined. Fifty percent of people with heart failure will be dead within five years of their diagnosis, and the only cure that we currently have for this devastating disease is heart transplantation. We perform over four thousand transplants a year in this country, but four hundred thousand people in the United States will die every year without access to this rare resource. So this field is really in need of novel and curative strategies. The most common cause of heart failure is a heart attack. So after you have a heart attack, millions of heart cells die, and they don't come back. Scar cells take over in their place, and the heart is a muscle that doesn't regenerate at all, and instead, the scar is permanent, and so it weakens the heart because of it. So our laboratory asked a very fundamental question: Can we rewire the DNA of these scar cells and coax them or reprogram them into changing their identity into a contracting heart cell? To test this, we tested over fifteen hundred different proteins, and we found one protein, PHF7, that very effectively converted these scar cells into contracting heart cells. When injected directly into the heart, PHF7 was able to do this within hours of delivery, and in preclinical models, it improved overall ejection fraction or cardiac function and improved survival after heart attack. So we're now carrying these studies forward to, uh, further testing, um, prior to translation of this therapy. Looking forward, we're looking for structurally similar proteins to PHF7 that may be able to work in a same way but either achieve different types of reprogramming or do it more powerfully or more precisely than what PHF7 does now. We're also asking, can these same principles of cellular reprogramming be applied to other contexts, like congenital heart disease? Asking whether we can reprogram or teach a heart that was never built correctly in the first place to rebuild or remodel itself. So this is our frontier: reprogramming a heart to heal itself. Father Ted believed that there was no conflict between science and faith except where there was bad science or bad theology. He fiercely defended scientific inquiry at this university because he knew what science is, that it's not certainty or control, but it is a humility before a truth that is much, much larger than yourself. He defended this university's scientific mission because he believed that as a Catholic institution above all other institutions, that we should be eagerly pursuing truth, that every discovery, every protein, every molecule was in fact a glimpse into what God has already known. I think one of Father Ted's greatest legacies, and I'm sure you've all heard this many, many times, was his constant direction to us students and alumni to invoke the Holy Spirit. He would say before every consequential moment or meeting the three words, "Come, Holy Spirit." These words are alive in our families. They're alive in our text chains. I say them before I walk into patient rooms with news that I don't want to deliver or before I begin an experiment that I don't think or know will work. I know I did not plan to become a physician scientist. I did not plan to work on these proteins or to work on the disease that took my grandmother. I know that nothing was planned, and I'm sure many of you have had this experience where you felt that everything that has worked out was rather given, given through doors that were opened after I had stopped looking for them or through mentors and collaborators who showed up at just the right moment. Father Ted's three words are not a passive resignation, but they're an act of trust, of trust that we are not working on this alone, trust that the Spirit moves in laboratories, in hospital rooms and financial offices and legal suites in the same way that it moves in the grotto, and trust that the work that you've been given to do is worth doing faithfully up until the end. So we all inherit things from those who came before us, and we'll all pass down things to those that come after us. But what we are doing today in laboratories is what we will leave behind to the next generation, the cures that we discover and the questions that we leave for those after us to answer. So that is our legacy, that is what we were taught to do at this university, and that is what we will pass down. So come, Holy Spirit