Improving cardiac treatments and ‘patient quality of life’
With support from a Ray A. Gaskins graduate fellowship, Md Ruhul Amin is exploring the therapeutic potential of milk-derived exosomes in treating heart attacks and tissue damage.
A Ray A. Gaskins graduate fellowship will support translational biology, medicine, and health doctoral student Md Ruhul Amin as he investigates new heart therapies at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC. Photo by Clayton Metz for Virginia Tech
Md Ruhul Amin’s path to biomedical research began with profound personal loss.
His father sustained a traumatic brain injury in a traffic accident. After two years in a coma, Amin’s father died. “As a son and a doctor, I could not do anything meaningful for his cure except give him some supportive treatment,” he said.
Amin had earned the Bangladeshi equivalent of a medical degree from Mymensingh Medical College. “I realized the limitations of our current therapeutic options,” he said. “I wanted to be a physician-scientist and think critically about improving current treatment options to improve patient quality of life.”
He earned a master’s degree in biotechnology at BRAC University, then worked as a research officer with Bangladesh’s Center for Medical Biotechnology. While there, he contributed to the country’s COVID-19 response. For his doctoral studies, he found his way to Virginia Tech’s Translational Biology, Medicine, and Health Graduate Program in 2021 and the laboratory of Robert Gourdie, professor at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC.
“His academic background is impressive, with a notable publication record on COVID variants prior to joining my lab,” said Gourdie, who is also director of the institute’s Center for Vascular and Heart Research.
Gourdie’s lab pioneered a scalable method for isolating purified small extracellular vesicles, commonly known as exosomes, from bovine milk. These milk-derived extracellular vesicles can protect fragile therapeutic molecules such as peptides, making them promising vehicles for drug delivery.
Amin quickly adopted and advanced the technique by showing that a sub-population of milk exosomes contained both the gap junction protein connexin 43 (Cx43) and naturally occurring truncated Cx43 C-terminal (CT) polypeptides. Similar peptides have demonstrated therapeutic potential in treating heart attacks and tissue damage in earlier studies.
After that, Amin developed a novel protocol that isolates connexin 43-containing milk-derived vesicles based on their interactions with extracellular matrix proteins — a technique now part of a patent application filed through Virginia Tech. “These findings open a new avenue for harnessing milk-derived vesicles as a platform for cardiac repair,” he said.
The early results have gotten attention. Amin won third prize for best poster presentation at the 2024 International Gap Junction Conference. “An interesting aspect of this award was that he won in the postdoc section,” Gourdie said. “Based on the quality of his presentation, the judges presumably thought he was a postdoc, rather than a graduate student.”
Amin is also co-first author on a manuscript reporting his initial discoveries.
Amin is the recipient of a Gaskins graduate fellowship that will support his work in the Gourdie lab. Ray A. Gaskins ’64, Ph.D. ’72, a retired Hampden-Sydney College faculty member, funds fellowships for students on the university’s Health Sciences and Technology campus in Roanoke who are conducting doctoral research with Fralin Biomedical Research Institute faculty.
Amin plans to use the fellowship to help his transition to postdoctoral research in cardiology. “My long-term goal is to become an independent physician-scientist,” Amin said.
