Brown University scientists who study the brain are conducting groundbreaking research that could eventually yield significant medical advances.
About 100 Brown faculty members are part of the university’s Brain Science Program, which brings together researchers from separate departments and across a wide array of disciplines.
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Recent innovative research efforts that have come out of the program have involved collaborations of biologists, chemists, psychiatrists, engineers, computer scientists, mathematicians and physicists.
The findings could one day result in the development of new drugs to prevent or treat Alzheimer’s disease, muscular dystrophy and epilepsy, and the creation of new technologies to restore sight to the blind and help the paralyzed to move again.
In particular, a handful of brain-research breakthroughs that recently have stirred the field after appearing in academic journals have come out of Brown’s Department of Neuroscience, which has 14 full-time faculty members, each with their own lab of researchers from different disciplines.
In the current issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Mayank Mehta, an assistant professor of neuroscience, and his co-author, the Nobel-winning physiologist Bert Sakmann, published research on how the brain processes memories during sleep. They say the work eventually could yield treatments for Alzheimer’s disease.
The research team, which included mathematicians and physicists who employed their expertise on magnetic properties and string theory, measured the relationships of cellular activity inside the hippocampus and the neocortex of lab rats – areas of the brain that may work together to make and store memory.
They discovered new information about the “dialogue” between those two parts of the brain that ran counter to what was previously believed, and that could eventually help researchers understand the cause of Alzheimer’s disease, Mehta said.
“The applications could be enormous,” he said. “First, we’ll have an idea of what is going on with people when they get Alzheimer’s. We have some idea at the level of biochemistry … but we don’t know exactly the way in which these cognitive deficits arise.”
In a separate study, a team of neuroscience researchers recently shed light on the inner workings of the cortex that could help explain the cause of some forms of epilepsy.
Scott Cruikshank, an assistant research professor, was the lead author of a report in Nature Neuroscience that offered a breakthrough understanding of how the cortex – the largest and most recently evolved part of the human brain – handles information at the very earliest stages of processing.
The research set out to learn more about how the thalamus, another part of the brain, affects the work of neurons and synapses in the cortex as they transmit information as tiny electrical bursts and with the help of chemicals. Their discovery, which ran contrary to what many scientists believed, was that cells in the cortex that suppress communication are more stimulated by the thalamus than cells that encourage communication.
“We try to understand the nuts and bolts of the cortex – how these electrical discharges occur, and then how the cells communicate with each other via these synapses and their little chemical signals,” said Barry Connors, chairman of the department of neuroscience and the senior scientist on the project. “We want to understand how it works under normal circumstances, and then we’re also very interested in pathologies, diseases. And I’ve worked particularly long and hard on epileptic seizures, and how it is that the cortex generates those.”
In yet another recent article to appear in Nature Neuroscience, a research team led by Professor Diane Lipscombe presented research about how morphine and other opiates work in the brain that could help drug companies develop safer painkillers.
Other researchers at Brown are pioneers in the new field of neurotechnology, which is combining the fields of medicine, human biology and computer engineering to develop electronic devices that replace human body parts and re-stimulate lost functions.
In the same way that hearing aids have enabled people with hearing loss to regain hearing, scientists at Brown across a range of disciplines are developing retinal implants to restore sight to the blind, and working on several systems that could help people living with paralysis to feed themselves and maybe even walk.
An example of such work that made international headlines when it was announced is BrainGate, a brain-computer interface system first developed in the laboratory of John Donoghue, director of the Brain Science Program.
BrainGate uses a sensor implanted in the brain in combination with external processors that turn the brain’s electrical signals into movement commands to artificial devices, enabling people with paralysis to use a computer, control a wheelchair and even operate a robotic hand.
[BrainGate is manufactured and marketed by Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems Inc. (OTCBB: CYKN), under a research and licensing partnership with Brown.]
