The Christine Lary Lab

Our group conducts a wide variety of research involving retrospective analyses of existing databases. We also perform extensive collaborative research both with basic science and clinical researchers as well as perform methodological research in big data methods. Some of our current projects are described below.

Fracture Risk in Nursing Home Residents

One current area of focus involves a study entitled "Beta blockers and their impact on fracture risk in nursing home residents taking atypical antipsychotics” that is part of a larger grant entitled “COBRE (Center of Biomedical Research Excellence) in Mesenchymal and Neural Regulation of Metabolic Networks” (Lucy Liaw, PI). Our project is a pharmacoepidemiological study of atypical antipsychotic use among elderly nursing home residents at risk for hip fractures and the potential mitigating impact of co-therapy with beta blockers. See Figure 1 for a description of the team members on the project.

Figure 1. Project team members for “Beta blockers and their impact on fracture risk in nursing home residents taking atypical antipsychotics”.

Risperiodne and Bone Loss

We are also involved in a bioinformatics project in collaboration with fellow COBRE grant project leader Katherine Motyl investigating the effects of risperidone, an atypical antipsychotic (AA) drug, on bone loss in a mouse model. Data from the Motyl lab shows that co-therapy with the beta-blocker propranolol significantly curtailed bone loss, suggesting bone loss is due to metabolic consequences of sympathetic nervous system activation. We are collecting and analyzing multi-omics data including mRNA, proteomic, and lipidomic data to investigate how sympathetic activation leads to bone loss in risperidone-treated mice. We hope to also develop robust methods for integration of multi-omic data that may be applied to other datasets. Figure 2 shows a schematic of the relation between Dr. Motyl’s and my COBRE projects and Figure 3 shows an overview of the proposed bioinformatics pipeline we propose to develop.

Figure 2. Project overview (left) and relation to mouse studies in collaborating project (Motyl, right).

Figure 3. Proposed schematic for mutli-omics integration pipeline.