UToledo Hypertension Researcher Earns Prestigious American Heart Association Award

UToledo Hypertension Researcher Earns Prestigious American Heart Association Award

Dr. Bina Joe, a trailblazing hypertension researcher whose work established the link between gut bacteria and blood pressure regulation, was recently recognized with a major award from the American Heart Association.

Joe, a Distinguished University Professor and chair of The University of Toledo Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, received the Excellence in Hypertension Research Award last month.

The award is the highest honor bestowed by the AHA Council on Hypertension and one of the most prestigious awards in all of hypertension research.

"Most recently, we've been studying how an individual's gut bacteria play a role in the development of high blood pressure, but The University of Toledo has a 60-year history of groundbreaking hypertension research," Joe said. "Bringing this award home is a very big recognition not only for me but for our institution as a place that continues to contribute to the field of hypertension internationally."

Joe, who joined UToledo in 2001, has devoted her career to studying the mechanisms of hypertension - a disease that affects nearly half of all American adults and more than 1.2 billion adults worldwide.

Beginning with her work in the genetics of hypertension, Joe's internationally recognized research has focused on unraveling potential causes of hypertension that go beyond one's diet and exercise routine.

In 2015, she was the first to publish a scientific paper detailing the link between gut microbiota and hypertension. That paper helped to launch a new field of study which has exploded over the past few years.

"It took a while for the hypertension community to realize the importance of this research, but it is becoming central to how we look at hypertension," Joe said. "In the last century we thought of humans as one organism. Now there is a realization that it is an ecosystem with one organism and many microbes. That change in thinking shifts everything in how we think about new medicines. It's not just treating the body but resetting the ecosystem within us."

Joe's lab published research last year proving that engineered bacteria can lower blood pressure. While there has been a quickly growing body of evidence that changes in microbiota can elevate blood pressure, the 2023 paper was the first to show the feasibility of leveraging gut bacteria to treat hypertension.

She also has overseen collaborative research with colleagues in her lab that found gut bacteria can lessen the effectiveness of certain blood pressure medication, providing clues to why some individuals don't respond well to treatment, and work that showed the blood-pressure-lowering potential of boosting the body's supply of beta hydroxybutyrate, a chemical produced predominantly by the liver.

Earlier this year, Joe received a new National Institutes of Health grant to investigate how bacteria-driven changes to bile acids in the gut affect blood pressure.

That study, funded by $3.85 million from the National Heart Lung and Blood institute, builds on earlier findings from her lab that supplementing mice with taurine or taurocholic acid supplements could successfully lower their blood pressure.

"There is still so much more to be understood about how our own creation of antibiotics and environmental chemicals that kill microbiota have impacted our blood pressure and thereby our cardiovascular health," Joe said. "But we are inching closer to completely novel ways of treating hypertension. These are aspirational goals, but goals that are increasingly within our reach."

The Excellence Award for Hypertension Research and its predecessor awards have been presented annually since 1966 to recognize major discoveries in the field of hypertension.

Among the prior recipients are Dr. John Paul Rapp, a UToledo professor emeritus and one of Joe's mentors, and four scientists who went on to win Nobel Prizes.

"This is a major award that has been bestowed upon some of the brightest, most impactful researchers in our field," Joe said. "I am dedicated to continuing this work and would be extremely gratified to one day see a new therapy to correct hypertension that came about from our early work in the connection to microbiota."

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