Associate Professor Helen Kim Author on Breakthrough Study Published in Nature

Associate Professor and Center for Cerebrovascular Research investigator, Helen Kim, PhD, MPH, and her colleagues, have published a breakthrough study in Nature, establishing the connection between brain vascular malformations and our microbiome, or gut bacteria. The article, “Endothelial TLR4 and the Microbiome Drive Cerebral Cavernous Malformations,” has recently been featured in major news outlets such as the New York Times. Specifically, Dr. Kim and her colleagues played a major role in demonstrating the relevance of the animal findings for this study, using the human cerebral cavernous malformation (CCM) cohort from their U54-funded BVMC CCM study. The human subjects provided DNA samples that were genotyped at the UCSF Genomics Core Facility.