Hopes of ‘blood test for suicide’ grow
The emails started arriving soon after a news release went out heralding the stunning research findings, led by young molecular biologist Zachary Kaminsky.
“A blood test for suicide?” was the headline on the release issued by Johns Hopkins University’s school of medicine in 2014. It explained that Kaminsky and other researchers at the Baltimore institution had discovered a chemical alteration in a gene called SKA2 linked to stress reduction. That finding could help doctors predict and prevent suicide through a blood test.
Soon Kaminsky began hearing from parents whose children had killed themselves. They wanted help and closure. Some sent samples of their dead children’s blood, begging him to test it. One woman wrote simply: “I have lost my grandfather, father and one son to suicide. I have one left. Save him.” Kaminsky received hundreds of emails, and they keep coming.
The experience is not one that could be easily forgotten. It has helped drive Kaminsky, now 40, to work toward a game-changing goal of not only predicting suicide risk with a simple blood or saliva test, but preventing it by using some of the biomarkers identified in his lab.
It’s a goal he brings to Ottawa, as the newly appointed Suicide Prevention Research Chair at The Royal.
The position, funded with two $1-million grants from Do It For Daron (DIFD) and the MachGaensslen Foundation, is possible, in part, through the bake sales and community events that have become the grassroots hallmark of the purple-clad DIFD movement.
“This was funded through the community plugging away,” said Stephanie Richardson, whose 14-year-old daughter Daron took her own life in 2014. She and her husband Luke, a former assistant coach with the Ottawa Senators, helped create DIFD, which focuses on raising awareness, fighting stigma and inspiring conversations about youth mental health.
“This is the $5 bake sale at the elementary school, a toque somebody bought at the rink, the $2 cupcakes,” Richardson said.
The money didn’t come in the form of large donations, but was raised “conversation to conversation. I’m overwhelmed by what we can accomplish. It’s a testimony to the community. This belongs to everybody.”
Richardson, who was part of the Royal selection committee that hired Kaminsky, said she was looking for “hope” in the research that will result.
Kaminsky’s work brings promise for the kind of hope that has long eluded the world of suicide prevention.
He believes that, within a matter of years, a clinical test will exist that could save lives by predicting suicide risk.
“We have a chance with biomarkers to do good in the very near future, I think. That’s my life’s goal — to see some of the biomarkers identified in my lab being used to save people.”
At the heart of his research is epigenetics, the study of chemical modifications to DNA that act like a light switch. Genes can get turned on and off by epigenetic factors, which is what Kaminsky studies on a molecular level.
His research has helped identify biomarkers that indicate a high risk for postpartum depression and another that points to a high risk of suicide. The gene associated with a higher risk of suicide works as a kind of “brake pad” for stress response. If the brake pad is thinner, because lower amounts of the gene are being made, it doesn’t work as well in responding to stress.
Kaminsky, the son of a highprofile director of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, was raised knowing there’s a deep need for research in mental health.
“It got me on the path to thinking mental illness was a natural thing to study.”
His love of “deciphering the puzzles of disease through science” steered him toward a career in the lab. Falling in love with Canada brought him to Toronto, where he worked in an epigenetics lab at the University of Toronto and became convinced that hope for mental health research could be found in the field.
Now, after moving his young family to Ottawa, Kaminsky’s aim is to expand the understanding of biomarkers that increase suicide risk beyond the SKA2 discovery his lab in Baltimore made in 2014. In order to have an effective test for suicide risk and a pathway for treatment, there must be a broader understanding of the many biological factors that play a role, he said.
Being able to diagnose a predisposition to suicide also raises ethical questions, given existing stigma around mental illness. As a start, he said, a test would have to be extremely accurate to limit false positives.
Once researchers can more accurately predict who is at the highest suicide risk, “we can start to think about looking at interventions.”
He suggested the military might be an obvious place to put resulting diagnostics to work.
The biological approach to identifying and treating mental illness resonates with the public and helps reduce stigma, he said, a lesson he carries from the many emails he received.
“When we point out mental illness is linked to the DNA, it makes it poignantly real. This isn’t something in your head. Like heart disease, it is a real disease.”
For families who have lost a loved one to suicide, “this has the power to take away some of the confusion, to suggest that maybe there is a reason why that is inherent in biology.”
Kaminsky said he’s aware of the community effort that went into raising some of the funding for this new position at The Royal.
“It is my great goal to be worthy of all of that energy and effort. I feel that I’m working not for myself, but for the Ottawa community and the Canadian community.”
His aim is to see his work “actualized into something that is going to save people.
“Just maybe if we hit the jackpot here, we could help millions of people. That would be a pretty gratifying life’s work if we got there. That is the eye on the prize.”
Just maybe if we hit the jackpot here, we couldhelp millions of people. That wouldbea pretty gratifying life’s work ...