Hibernation, Humans and Me: My Story on Conquering Disease

I remember my introduction to hibernation, outside of what we’re taught in primary school, in the office of my Ph.D. mentor, Dr. Sandy Martin. She showed me a chart graphing the body temperature measurements of a 13-lined ground squirrel taken throughout the year. In the summer, the line on this graph stayed relatively flat, hovering at a temperature of 37°C (or 98°F), what you hope to see when measuring the body temperature of a “warm-blooded” mammal. But around October, the body temperature line suddenly plummets to just above freezing at 4°C (or 39°F). For perspective, death is pretty inevitable for humans below 21°C (70°F). For the 13-lined ground squirrel, the animal’s body temperature then stays at 4°C, for a week or two before, amazingly rising almost straight up until it again reaches 37°C. Then after briefly hovering at 37°C, the line once again sharply turns and goes straight down to 4°C! This pattern repeats over and over across the winter months until they spontaneously stop in April, where the body temperature line resumes its flat horizontal trajectory at 37°C into the summer months.

I knew entering the Ph.D. program in human medical genetics at the University of Colorado’s medical campus that I wanted to cure human diseases, and I knew the best way to cure diseases was to first identify the genes causing these diseases. Dr. Martin explained that we know hibernating animals have to become protected from a number of conditions that would cause disease in humans, such as ischemia-reperfusion injury, which occurs when you have a heart attack or stroke. Her lab was working to identify the common genes between humans and these animals, and helped me realize that if we identify those genes, we can learn how to better treat, manage and potentially cure human diseases.

I spent the next five years of my Ph.D. teasing out proteins and RNA from biobanked 13-lined ground squirrel tissue samples until I had finally identified genes that the squirrels were using during hibernation! It was through this effort and thrill of discovery that I developed a passion for studying hibernation. When I started a postdoctoral fellowship in Dr. Carlos Bustamante’s laboratory at Stanford University, I found myself wanting to apply all of the current human genetic research techniques that I was learning about to the field of hibernation. I received a grant in pursuit of this and spent the remainder of my postdoctoral fellowship gaining a better understanding of the genetics of hibernation and what allows so many mammals to do it successfully.

I’m sure many postdocs can relate - it was a period of intense personal struggle, but two pivotal things happened. First, I was invited by NASA to give a talk on my research and to participate in a two-day workshop focused on harnessing hibernation for human space travel. And second, two other postdoctoral scholars in my lab,my eventual co-founders, Ashley Zehnder and Linda Goodman, approached me about starting a company with them focused on using data from non-traditional animal models to improve human health. It was these two events that led to me becoming a founder of Fauna Bio. While the NASA meeting inspired the bona fide need for translating animal adaptations into human therapies, the idea to start a company made me realize that not all research is best accomplished in academia. Now, instead of spending my days distracted by all of the hoops I need to jump through to obtain a tenured professorship, I get to spend them curing human diseases using data from hibernating mammals. I can’t imagine working on anything else.