Title:NHS Professor Catches the Scent of Fresh Discoveries

Above: Blythe Shepard (center) and her research team, including Ryan Kurtz and Lily Steinberg (C’20), focus on the role of microscopic olfactory receptors in metabolic diseases.

Every day, Blythe Shepard, assistant professor of human science at the School of Nursing & Health Studies, runs along the C&O Canal in Georgetown to think. She never wears headphones, preferring to listen to wildlife sharing her refuge inside the city and let possibilities for new research wash over her.

One day, she turned a new bend on her route toward campus and suddenly the Washington Monument rose before her.

“I had no idea that you could see the monument from that angle,” she says. “You don’t realize it’s there. But then you think that view was probably part of the architectural design.”

‘This is a whole new field, and you never know what you’re going to discover.’ —Blythe Shepard

Like the Washington Monument’s location, proteins are considered extremely well-mapped. But Shepard’s research team is finding that, like views of the monument, new levels of detail can reframe longtime understandings—in this case about how tissues work.

“What I love about this research is that you think you understand an organ system, and yet we’ve stumbled onto a complete unknown,” she says. “This is a whole new field, and you never know what you’re going to discover.”

Shepard was part of a team of researchers who were the first to discover that microscopic olfactory receptors—the kind found in the nose that allow organisms to smell—are also present in the kidney. Similarly, Shepard’s colleagues in the field have discovered opsins, or sight receptors, in human blood vessels.

At Georgetown, Shepard and her undergraduate research assistants are mapping sensory receptors in the liver. Their mission is simple: Find the receptors’ specific locations in organs, identify what activates the receptors, and determine their functions. The potential impact of their findings, Shepard says, are endless. For example, she has previously discovered how one olfactory receptor, Olfr1393, regulates transporters that retain glucose in the blood when filtered through the kidneys, a major boon to understanding how to control blood-sugar levels in people with Type II diabetes. Other labs have found that receptors affect muscle regeneration, skin-wound healing, sperm movement, blood-pressure regulation, and glucagon secretion by the pancreas.

If Shepard’s Georgetown team can learn more about the receptors’ roles in the liver for controlling metabolism, breaking down drugs, and detoxifying alcohol, they may be able to identify new therapeutic targets.