Research straight from the heart
Eric Puumala, Callie Knapp and professor Jackie Towner study a deadly disease, hoping to lay the groundwork for future studies. The things they learn have the chance to benefit hundreds of thousands, but first, they have to design, experiment, analyze and overcome.
By Dominic Dunn and Marcelo Ortega | Reporting/Writing and Photography/Graphics
Eric Puumala stood hunched over the cryotome. For a lab hardly the size of a bedroom, this machine sure was huge. Its white-painted metal reflected the harsh light from the fluorescent bulbs overhead, and the slight hum of the circulating coolant could be heard only if Puumala really stopped to listen. With precision, he adheres one of the hearts — a donation from one of the diseased lab rats sacrificed only days earlier– to the grippy rubber slab inside of the machine and begins to turn the crank outside. As the mechanism moves the sample up and down, slices much thinner than a razorblade, 10 µm to be exact, peel away. These tiny, seemingly insignificant samples hold information that could lengthen and improve hundreds of thousands of lives.
“Science was always something I loved. So it just made sense.” — Eric Puumala, biology major
Since he was 8, Puumala has always been fascinated with biology and medicine. His father, also Eric, worked as a physician, so the young researcher was always surrounded by the subject. He looked up to his dad, and even as a high-school student at Sioux Falls Christian School in South Dakota, Puumala knew he wanted to study biology and become a doctor.
“Science was always something I loved,” Puumala said. “So it just made sense.”
Now a senior at Bethel, he works in the emergency department as a medical scribe. It’s just one step in achieving the dream he set eyes on as a little kid. A dream that has led Puumala down the track of a biology major.
Since her college days, Towner has participated in research. While working through her graduate program at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, she rotated through many biochemistry lab groups, including one related to Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. This was the space where she first developed an interest in the research.
“I mean, DMD is a rare disorder when you look at the context of things, but [the research] is very impactful,” Towner said. “Because it’s research that can influence whether a person lives or dies.”
A genetic muscular degenerative disorder that affects 1 in 5000 male-designated births, DMD has no cure or prevention and is always deadly. Those diagnosed have a life expectancy of only 25 years. This is because in a heart with DMD, the muscle actually damages itself leading to fibrosis (scarring). This scar tissue builds up and eventually makes it impossible for the heart to do its job.
Towner’s interest and understanding of its importance led her to continue the research at the University of California, Los Angeles before starting at Bethel University in 2022.
Her research involves seeding different heart cells onto different types of heart matrices in order to determine the different types of interaction between the matrix and the cells. How it changes over time, and what will lead to different severities of fibrosis and ultimately heart failure.
While this research may have started with Towner, its transition to Bethel resulted in the project gaining traction among two of the students. Puumala and Callie Knapp, another Bethel student majoring in biology, joined the research as a capstone project, working alongside Towner to design procedures and goals for the study.
“She’s just… she’s so kind. Just to everyone I mean. And it’s just… it’s fun and our relationship has really grown.” — Eric Puumala, student researcher
The team quickly became close, and the two students admired Towner for her kindness, caring, and mentorship. Knapp and Towner would often sit on the dock, eating lunch and talking about their lives, plans, and faith.
“She’s just… she’s so kind. Just to everyone I mean,” Puumala said. “And it’s just… it’s fun and our relationship has really grown.”
In the lab, the team shared the same bond. Working together to overcome challenges, coming up with different ways to solve problems and growing as a group.
Conducting this research for the first time at Bethel, there were a lot of logistical problems that the team had to solve. One of the biggest was contamination of the samples. At one point, the trio walked into the cell culture room to retrieve their samples to continue working with them, but upon further inspection, white fuzzy bacteria had infected them, making them useless. This setback came just in front of their approaching deadline, and the samples took weeks to prepare
“More than anything, I just wanted it to work,” said Knapp. “You get your hopes up… and it’s just disappointing.”
Most of this research was done in the summer due to higher availability of resources and space, so as the start of this school year approached, the research team had to move quickly. Harvesting samples. Preparing the tissue. Isolating cells. Seeding the matrix. Analyzing samples. Recording data. Inputting data. Interpreting results. Repeat.
This went on for weeks. The team was exhausted and feeling lost. They hadn’t collected as much data as they wanted. The multiple setbacks from the contamination and lack of information left them feeling downtrodden.
Even though they accomplished as much as they could, they wondered “was it enough?”
Sitting at Knapp’s kitchen table, the two worked on the final touches of the project. Knapp started on the presentation of findings while Puumala typed in data into a program on his MacBook. It all came down to this. If they had done enough to show that their data was meaningful.
“We held it with such loose hands. There were so many conversations with Eric… if nothing else works out, we created a procedure for decellularization at Bethel. If nothing works out, we still made a little bit of a dent in the world.” — Callie Knapp, student researcher
The procedural mishaps left them without a ton of hope, and they knew that there was no guarantee that the program would show anything at all.
“We held it with such loose hands,” Knapp said. “There were so many conversations with Eric… if nothing else works out, we created a procedure for decellularization at Bethel. If nothing works out, we still made a little bit of a dent in the world.”
They were prepared to not see the culmination of their efforts. They were content with just laying the groundwork for the research.
But after Eric put in the last of his data, the computer spat out the processed information: a p-value high enough to constitute statistical significance.
This was the moment they were waiting for. Their data meant something.
“It gave us validation,” said Puumala. “That our work meant something, you know? That the time wasn’t all for nothing.”
To celebrate their success, the team reunited to share a meal at Towner’s house. Sitting in the dining room, eating chicken over coconut rice with a slight kick from the mango jalapeño salsa, the team felt accomplished. They talked about faith, told stories and discussed plans for the future, knowing that the wealth that they gained from their relationships and shared experiences was so much greater than just the results.
Glossary
