By Dawn Brazell
Public Relations
Some life events seem just too good to be true. That's why researcher Emily Allen found herself repeatedly refreshing the online website to see her name listed as a recipient of the three-year, prestigious National Science Foundation's Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP).

Emily Allen, biomedicine researcher, studies pygmy sperm whales. Like the sperm whales pictured above, these deep divers offer clues to how they thrive under pressure.

"I didn't really believe it," she said. "I think ecstatic disbelief may describe part of what I was feeling. I must have refreshed the page over 50 times in the hour and a half after results were posted. I feel honored to receive the award."

For good reason.

Eric Lacy, Ph.D., director of the Marine Biomedicine and Environmental Sciences (MBES) Center, said that MUSC has received only one of these highly-competitive awards previously, despite annual submissions for decades. "Proudly, I must say that the other award also came to an MBES student. Nonetheless, Emily's accomplishment with her mentor, Dr. Demetri Spyropoulos, is a coup for MUSC and the Marine Biomedicine Center."

Allen, a doctoral student in MBES, will be studying the amazing but highly elusive member of the toothed whales, the pygmy sperm whale. Her mentor, Spyropoulos, Ph.D., said the award speaks volumes about Allen, the MBES center and the Oceans & Human Health Training program.

"Emily is a very bright, motivated and engaging individual. She has had interdisciplinary research experiences in marine, earth, and physical sciences," he said. "She cares greatly about the environment and human health and has been very involved in making a positive impact on the teaching, public education and policy-making levels and within the natural world."

Originally on a pre-med track, Allen said she got sidetracked when she took a Wood's Hole SEA semester that put her on a large, research sailing vessel for a trip across the Pacific. The Maine native who grew up on the coast was hooked. When she found MUSC's program that blends marine science and biology, she found she could combine both of her loves.

Allen's research focuses on the pygmy sperm whale. Though the mammal is a small to mid-sized whale, it can reach the depths of the larger deep divers, such as the blue whale. Humans cannot withstand that kind of pressure, so it's amazing how these animals can, she said.

"One of the interesting things about their physiology is the deep-diving part because their bodies are able to withstand intense pressures. When you go down to that depth, in addition to high levels of compression, the conditions are also very hypoxic, and their bodies are able to compensate for these extreme conditions. Their physiological differences from other animals are interesting in their own right."

The pygmy sperm whale is among the deepest diving mammals, spending up to 90 minutes at depths of up to 2000 meters or about 1.24 miles. This feat is done with very little time on the surface and without the decompression dives that larger deep diving mammals do.

To put this in context, Spyropoulos said the maximum dive time for a person at 1/100th the depth that the whale can reach is 45 minutes without decompression and that divers have to wait a whole day before diving again to the same depth while still loosing 10 percent of their dive time for safety reasons.

"We think that the extreme adaptation of the pygmy sperm whale to long periods of high pressure and low oxygen makes them ideal candidates for learning about cellular and molecular processes that could help divers with the bends and people with breathing disorders," said Spyropoulos. "We also believe that their extreme lifestyle may make them highly susceptible to anthropogenic toxins."

Spyropoulos said the project really took off when Allen's mentor and his close collaborator John Baatz, Ph.D., and their group developed a procedure for freezing live lung tissue from deceased and stranded pygmy sperm whales that have washed up on the South Carolina coastline. They were able to salvage a variety of viable lung cell types from these frozen tissue samples, which will be of great use in the banking of rare and endangered species, he said. They were also able to take one cell type, the fibroblast, and induce it to behave like stem cells.

"With these stem cells, we have the potential to generate many more cell types and tissues of the body beyond those of the lung."

Dr. John Baatz and colleagues developed a procedure for freezing live lung tissue from deceased and stranded pygmy sperm whales that has led to important research applications.

Spyropoulos said these cell types and reconstructed tissues will be used to study normal functions under stress and their responses to toxins, such as liver toxicity and enlarged (hypertrophic) heart syndrome that the pygmy sperm whales experience. The stem cells themselves also can be studied for their regenerative capacity under stress, which may be more critically important in high-endurance, extreme environments.

"In Emily's work, there's potential benefit for us and those around us, and a heightened appreciation for life in general on this incredible planet."

Allen said she's excited because the research will be breaking new ground. "It can go a lot of ways. I'm sure it will evolve like any research. There's a lot I can look at. That's one of the exciting parts. I can't derail on this one."
Its medical applications are wide open from shedding light on ways to help divers and astronauts dealing with unusual pressure conditions and extreme G-forces to the exciting frontier into the mysteries of how cells differentiate.

"I think one reason it got funding was because it's basic biology. It's looking at the characteristics of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) between species. It's seeing the differences in the expression of genes or proteins or molecules that could change their actual physiology. Maybe there's something innate about them that's different and that would contradict everything we think we know about stem cells."

Researchers have figured out how to make such cells as hepatocytes of the liver and cardiomyocytes of the heart. How they respond to stress and toxins and how they regenerate—is a critical area of exploration with many practical medical applications. "It's really important to know exactly where the differentiation potential comes from and what the differences between species or even within a species are. It all sheds light on the bigger mystery."

Allen has no doubt the marine world holds important clues, and she loves that she can help unlock some of the secrets of the deep. "There's a big undiscovered pool of knowledge out there."