2024-07-06
48 分钟Recently, a series of papers were published in Nature and Nature journals illuminating the physiologic effects of exercise from an NIH initiative called MoTrPAC. To understand the wealth of new findings, I spoke with Professor Euan Ashley, who, along with Matt Wheeler, heads up the bioinformatics center. Earlier this week, Stanford announced Euan Ashley will be the new Chair of the Department of Medicine. He has done groundbreaking work in human genomics, including rapid whole genome sequencing for critically ill patients and applying the technology for people with unknown diseases. A few years ago he published The Genome Odyssey book. As you’ll see from our conversation, he has also done extensive work on the science of exercise. Video snippet from our conversation. Full videos of all Ground Truths podcasts can be seen on YouTube here. The audios are also available on Apple and Spotify. Transcript with audio and external links Eric Topol (00:06): Well, hello, it's Eric Topol with Ground Truths, and I'm really delighted today to welcome my friend, Euan Ashley. He is the Roger and Joelle Burnell Chair of Genomics and Precision Health at Stanford. He's done pioneering work in genomics, but today we're going to talk about something very different, which he also is working in exercise. Exercise the cover of a Nature paper in May regarding this MoTrPAC, which we're going to talk about this big initiative to understand the benefits of exercise. But before I hand it over to Euan, and I just want to mention his description of the paper that he posted to summarize started with, “Exercise may be the single most potent medical intervention ever known.” So Euan welcome. Euan Ashley (01:01): Yeah, well, great. It's wonderful to be here, Eric, and so nice to see you. Eric Topol (01:06): Yeah. Well, we have a lot to talk about because exercise is a fascinating topic. And I guess maybe we'd start with the MoTrPAC, which is an interesting acronym that you all came up with. Maybe tell us a bit about that with the 800 rats and the 2,400 people and the 17,000 molecules, there’s a lot there. Euan Ashley (01:24): Right, right. Yeah. Well, first of all, of course, before you do any scientific study, especially with a large number of people in a consortium, you need a good acronym. So that was where we started with the idea was to focus on the molecular transducers of physical activity. As you pointed out there at the beginning, we really don’t have a more potent medical intervention, especially for prevention of disease. I mean, it’s just such a powerful thing that we have, and yet we don’t really understand how it works. And so, the MoTrPAC Consortium was designed to really work together, bring groups of people across the US together who all have some interest in exercise and some ability to measure molecules and really put together the world's largest study of exercise to try and start answering some of the questions about where the potency of this intervention come from. Eric Topol (02:20): So the first crop of papers, and there were several of them that came out all on the same day in Nature publications, was about the rats. The people part is incubating, but can you give us a skinny on, there was a lot there, but maybe you could just summarize what you thought were the main findings. Key MoTrPAC Findings Euan Ashley (02:43): Yeah, of course, of course. And the MoTrPAC Consortium, I'll say first of all, yeah, large group is probably I think 36 principal investigators funded by the Common Fund. And so, it brings together large numbers of people, some of whom who spend most of their time thinking about let’s say animal exercise. Some have spent a lot of time thinking about humans in exercise and many of whom think about measuring technologies. And as you say, these first group of papers were focused on the rat study, but actually the study goes much more broadly than that. But of course, there are some advantages to the animal