I really enjoy teaching second years. I try to make it as interactive and case-based as possible, and CVDL is growing at a rapid pace; it’s nice to be a part of it all.
Dr. Emily Brinker Publishes Research into Endocrine Fibroblast Growth Factors
Article featured in Domestic Animal Endocrinology aggregates wealth of data on potential benefits of FGFs to detect and treat veterinary diseases
Dr. Emily Brinker (she/her), assistant clinical professor in the Department of Comparative Pathobiology at Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University, is the lead author of an article she hopes will draw more attention and research into fibroblast growth factors and the advances they could bring to animal health. The article “Endocrine fibroblast growth factors in domestic animals” was published in the October 2024 issue of Domestic Animal Endocrinology.
“The endocrine fibroblast growth family as a whole is not very well known,” says Brinker. “Research into targeting endocrine FGF pathways brings huge potential to treat different diseases in small animals. There’s a lot of research on the human side that could translate to animals.”
Fibroblast growth factors (FGFs) are proteins in animal cells that impact certain biological processes. The paper is a comprehensive overview of studies into the FGF19 subfamily, including FGF15/19, FGF21, and FGF23.
According to the paper, “Current research in human and rodent models demonstrates the potential of these endocrine FGFs to target various diseases, including disorders of renal disease, chronic liver disease, obesity, and insulin resistance.”
The paper highlights a number of significant findings from previous studies. For example, FGF23 is a biomarker of chronic kidney disease in both cats and dogs. FGF19 is being investigated as a biomarker of metabolic and cholestasis-related diseases. Treatment with FGF21 may also help alleviate metabolic conditions.
Though the article included the entire family of FGF proteins, the case study is an extension of Brinker’s Ph.D. research into the regulation of FGF21 in domestic cats. She earned her Ph.D. in veterinary biosciences at Auburn University College of Veterinary Medicine, where she also completed her residency in anatomic pathology.
Brinker’s interest in FGFs was sparked a few years earlier while earning her D.V.M. at St. George’s University in Grenada when her cat was diagnosed with diabetes. “It was hard to control. So I became interested from a personal standpoint in feline metabolism,” she says.
Her Ph.D. advisor and co-author on the paper, Dr. Emily Graff, was growing a fat cat colony at Auburn and invited Brinker to join the research team. They worked with Eli Lilly and Company on a drug under development to treat overweight cats. They were tasked with determining the appropriate and safe dosage of the exogenous FGF21 drug to treat the cats and evaluate the effects of the drug on long-term obesity.
“The cats’ job is essentially to eat as much as they want and sit around all day. They really enjoyed it,” she laughs. “We treated a group, and they all lost weight until we took away the drug, and they gained weight again.”
While the drug progressed to human trials, working similarly and deemed safe, Eli Lilly did not ultimately move forward with it.
Brinker’s initial entry into research was as a student technician in a plant pathology nematode lab at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) while earning her bachelor’s degree in mathematics at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. She also worked at a rabies vector wildlife rehabilitation facility, caring for orphaned raccoons and foxes. “That wildlife rehabilitation experience put me into veterinary medicine,” she recalls.
Brinker joined the faculty at Cummings School a year and a half ago. She works mainly in the Cummings School Veterinary Diagnostic Lab (CVDL) on diagnostics and collaborative research projects. She also teaches the Endocrine Pathophysiology course.
“I really enjoy teaching second years. I try to make it as interactive and case-based as possible,” she says. “And CVDL is growing at a rapid pace; it’s nice to be a part of it all.”
She recently co-authored a case series on canine oral fibro-lipomas, published this past summer in the journal Veterinary Pathology. She is working with others who aggregate pathology cases to develop multi-institutional compilations of data for a larger view of what clinicians are encountering in practice across institutions. She is collaborating with additional retrospective cases with the same colleagues to publish other less common diseases.
Other research projects Brinker is currently working on involve adenoviral hepatitis in bearded dragons and assessing copper levels in dogs after completing chelation therapy. She would also like to continue her research into FGF pathways, possibly collaborating with clinicians in cardiology and internal medicine at Cummings School.
“I have a lot of ideas if I have time to do them,” Brinker says. “I’d like to see if FGF23 can drive heart disease in cats. We need to look into how FGF21 can be used in the treatment of feline pancreatitis and feline hepatic lipidosis and FGF19 as a cholestatic disease marker in dogs. The endocrine FGFs are a family of important proteins with potential diagnostic and therapeutic benefits in veterinary medicine and deserve further study.”
Department:
Dept. of Comparative Pathobiology