Dr. Andrea Carmine Belin
Principal Investigator, Karolinska Institutet
Postdoctoral Researcher, Karolinska Institutet
PhD, Karolinska Institutet
As a child, Dr. Andrea Carmine Belin was fascinated by genetics. She loved observing physical traits in her friends that she also saw in their parents. How did a certain nose or smile get passed from parent to child? This innate curiosity led her to pursue an undergraduate degree in biomedical sciences, and as she took classes across several disciplines, Andrea discovered a new interest: neuroscience. Ultimately, she found her niche at the intersection of these first two scientific loves. Her lab at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden focuses on identifying and characterizing genetic markers for neurological disorders, with an emphasis on headache disorders.
Andrea was one of eleven members of the inaugural class of her biomedical program at the Karolinska Institutet. It was a BS/MS program, allowing her to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees within four years. Even at this early stage in her career, Andrea knew that she was interested in combining her interests in genetics and neuroscience. She did her master’s thesis on genetic risk factors for Parkinson’s disease (PD). Hooked on research and driven by the clear translational aspect of the work, Andrea chose to continue working on this project as she pursued her PhD, remaining at Karolinska and working primarily with Professor Lars Olson.
During her graduate work, Andrea collected blood samples from PD patients and healthy controls. As this was long before the dawn of high-throughput sequencing platforms, Andrea performed radioactive sequencing on the blood cells to obtain and compare the genetic information from subjects with and without PD. She also worked with postmortem human brain samples to further investigate whether PD patients had altered expression levels of various genes of interest. Finally, she further examined these genetic targets using animal models of PD. This work led to publications characterizing several genes that may contribute to risk of or protection against developing PD.
After earning her doctorate, Andrea considered multiple options, including moving into industry. She also thought she might want to move abroad and received an offer for a postdoc position at Columbia University in New York City. Ultimately, though, she chose to stay at the Karolinska Institutet. At the time, one of Andrea’s PhD supervisors, Dr Silvia Paddock, was moving abroad, and Andrea became excited at the prospect of building off the projects that this colleague was leaving behind. During her postdoc, while she continued to work on PD in the same group of labs at Karolinska Institutet, Andrea also greatly expanded her field of study. “Instead of going to other labs, I [...] recruited people from other labs with knowhow on new techniques and had a lot of international collaborations.” Instead of leaving to seek new science, she stayed and brought the new science to her. In the first part of her postdoc, she studied not only the genetic underpinnings of PD but also those of Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder, delving into genes that were involved in one or more of these neurological conditions.
Toward the second half of her postdoc, however, Andrea found a new passion in the lab that would ultimately help her launch her independent career: primary headache disorders. Primary headache disorders include migraine, cluster headache, and tension headache, which together account for about 98% of headaches. Andrea’s family has a history of migraines, and as she became an expert in understanding the genetics underlying particular neurological conditions, she wanted to apply that expertise to investigate headaches. Through her previous work, she had a contact at the Swedish Twin Registry—the largest of its kind in the world—and was able to get genetic data from migraine patients. Then, as she was seeking clinical collaborators, Andrea met a clinician who focuses on cluster headache and was eager to join forces. While migraine attacks typically last at least three hours, cause increased sensitivity to light and sound, and occur more frequently in women, cluster headache attacks last between 15 minutes to three hours (but can occur up to eight times per day), often cause restlessness, and are more common in men. Ultimately, Andrea created a niche for herself in the cluster headache field, as there was far less research on cluster headache than on migraine, leaving much for her to uncover.
In Sweden, the main requirement for being considered an independent group leader is securing both funding and students. Towards the end of her postdoc, Andrea already had PhD students working under her, so when she received a grant from the Swedish Research Council, she officially transitioned to being a PI. As she began her own lab, she set out to accomplish a huge feat: she knew that no one had performed a genome-wide association study (GWAS) for cluster headache, and she wanted to tackle the challenge. This gargantuan effort involved securing funding and ethics permits, finding collaborators to expand the study beyond Sweden (to secure enough samples for a properly powered GWAS), and importantly recruiting cluster headache patients who were willing to donate blood. Andrea is rightfully proud of the resulting study, which identifies four genetic loci linked to cluster headache in Sweden and the UK, and suggests immunological processes might be involved in their pathogenesis. A Dutch and Norwegian group separately published a study with similar results, helping to further validate Andrea’s findings.
In addition to following up on these genetic loci and how they contribute to disease, Andrea has begun to recruit collaborators across the world to be able to compare cluster headache genetics between the European cohorts and other ethnic groups, such as East Asians and North and South Americans. Additionally, her lab is interested in sex differences in cluster headache (for instance, women report more often that the attack onset is often related to sleep deprivation, while men report that onset seems linked to alcohol consumption) and how circadian rhythms interact with the disorder (people report that cluster headache attacks are more common at night). Andrea recently received a large grant to establish a Centre for Cluster Headache at the Karolinska Institutet. The center will provide a link between researchers and clinicians at a nearby hospital and will allow Andrea to further expand the questions she can ask and answer, hopefully leading to better treatment options for those who suffer from cluster headache.
Aside from research, Andrea is passionate about creating a healthy lab environment for her trainees. “I always try to be the boss that I would want for myself,” she says. Andrea believes that an important component of this goal is encouraging her lab members to attend and give talks at national and international conferences, participate at meetings with collaborators, and take courses both in Sweden and abroad. She is thrilled that her trainees are getting more of these opportunities than she had at their stage. Additionally, social media has become a big aspect of the lab culture. Andrea encourages her trainees to be involved in sharing their science across multiple platforms, which allows the public to understand what work goes on in the lab, raises awareness about cluster headache, and allows the lab to better connect with patient populations.
Andrea admits that her path through science is rare, as she has remained at the Karolinska Institutet throughout her entire career. But, she acknowledges, there are so many paths through academia that there really is not a “normal” path for comparison. Although she has remained in one place, Andrea has studied a wide variety of different disorders, with her passions for genetics and neuroscience weaving a common thread through all of her work. Karolinska has been lucky to bear witness to the entirety of her successes, and undoubtedly there are many more discoveries to come.
Find out more about Andrea and her lab’s research here.
Listen to Margarida’s full interview with Andrea on June 7, 2023 below!
