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Sarven Sabunciyan

Sarven Sabunciyan, PhD

Johns Hopkins Affiliations:
  • Johns Hopkins School of Medicine Faculty

Languages

  • English

Gender

Male

About Sarven Sabunciyan

Primary Academic Title

Associate Professor of Pediatrics

Background

Dr. Sabunciyan is a neuroscientist with expertise in molecular biology and next generation sequencing. His work is focused on developing peripheral biomarkers for monitoring fetal development and  brain diseases, with an emphasis on female mood disorders. He uses high throughput sequencing methods to characterize RNAs that are present in extracellular vesicles between disease cases and unaffected controls. Dr. Sabunciyan is also interested in understanding the role of the transcriptome and the methylome in the molecular etiology of other psychiatric disorders including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression.

Research Interests

Biomarkers, Mental Illnesses, Postpartum Depression, Fetal Development

Research Summary

The goal of my laboratory is to develop non-invasive blood tests that can monitor fetal development during pregnancy and assess the health of difficult to access organs such as the brain. We aim to develop such tests by characterizing extracellular vesicles (EV) in blood and other body fluids. EVs can be thought of as rafts released by cells enabling exchange of materials between cells of various tissues in the body including the brain and between mother and fetus. We developed laboratory and bioinformatics methods to characterize EV mRNAs circulating in blood. Applying these sequencing methods to blood samples collected in a cohort of postpartum depression (PPD) subjects revealed that EV mRNA signaling was drastically altered during pregnancy in women that went on to develop PPD. Our hope is that we can use EV mRNA levels in blood to identify pregnant women who are at risk of developing PPD. We also demonstrated that mRNAs that are specifically expressed in the brain are present in EVs circulating in blood and the level of these transcripts in blood associate with PPD. Potentially, these brain specific EV mRNAs in blood are providing a proxy for measuring brain health. As the absence of non-invasive tests that can monitor the status of the brain is a major obstacle for psychiatric and neurological care, overcoming this limitation has the potential to drastically improve patients’ lives. We are also finding that EV mRNA levels during pregnancy are associated with fetal development and are currently trying to develop “liquid biopsies” that are able to assess the health of the fetus at the molecular level.

Selected Publications

  • Sabunciyan S, Aryee MJ, Irizarry RA, Rongione M, Webster MJ, Kaufman WE, Murakami P, Lessard A, Yolken RH, Feinberg AP, Potash JB. Genome-wide DNA methylation scan in major depressive disorder. PloS one. 2012; 7(4):e34451. PubMed [journal] PMID:22511943, PMCID: PMC3325245

  • Sabunciyan S, Maher B, Bahn S, Dickerson F, Yolken RH. Association of DNA Methylation with Acute Mania and Inflammatory Markers. PloS one. 2015;10(7):e0132001. PubMed [journal] PMID: 26147665, PMCID: PMC4492496

  • Darby MM, Leek JT, Langmead B, Yolken RH, Sabunciyan S. Widespread splicing of repetitive element loci into coding regions of gene transcripts. Human molecular genetics. 2016; 25(22):4962-4982. PubMed [journal] PMID: 28171598

  • Darby MM, Yolken RH, Sabunciyan S. Consistently altered expression of gene sets in postmortem brains of individuals with major psychiatric disorders. Translational psychiatry. 2016; 6(9):e890. PubMed [journal] PMID: 27622934, PMCID: PMC5048210

  • Tyekucheva S, Yolken RH, McCombie WR, Parla J, Kramer M, Wheelan SJ, Sabunciyan S. Establishing the baseline level of repetitive element expression in the human cortex. BMC genomics. 2011; 12:495. PubMed [journal] PMID: 21985647, PMCID:PMC3207997

Expertise

Education

University of British Columbia

Ph.D., 2001

University of British Columbia

B.S., 1992