To many other researchers, creating a map of the 86 billion neurons, or nerve cells, that make up the brain would be considered a nearly insurmountable project. But researchers at the Allen Institute are pursuing the task, saying it will lay the foundation for a better understanding of how the brain works in its current form.
Founded in 2003 by Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Paul Allen, the Allen Institute was initially founded to map gene activity in the mouse brain, but researchers quickly began incorporating human brain studies into their work. The nonprofit is home to hundreds of researchers who, in large teams, are launching inspiring ‘moon-reaching projects’ that could help solve the biggest questions about diseases that affect millions of Americans.
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Allen Institute president and CEO Dr. “It does things a little differently than other research institutions,” Rui Costa told ABC News. “We do major projects in the life sciences, sometimes lasting 10, 15 years, where interdisciplinary teams of scientists answer a specific question, and then we share it openly with the world.”
Costa says these projects provide foundational work that can be used by other institutions. But these are extremely complex and need to be done at scale; This requires either a multidisciplinary team or even larger consortia.
Dr. D., senior investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Only recently have tools become available that allow researchers to make high-resolution maps of the brain, Ed Lein said, and these maps can provide complete descriptions of all cells in the brain. Lift the organ up.
He says the maps, described as the Moonshot project, will be similar to sequencing a genome that, when completed, describes the entire genetic makeup of a person.
“This becomes a really powerful reference not only for understanding the normal brain, but also for understanding diseases,” Lein told ABC News. “So we have a big effort to try to understand Alzheimer’s disease and the really specific cell types that might be vulnerable to the disease, but also to try to create new tools that can target specific cell types that could be really useful for gene therapies.”
“For example, if we can identify vulnerable cell types, we can now develop tools to control them to start targeting them,” Lein said. “And so, this is a completely new area of research opened up by new technologies.”
There are hundreds of brain diseases, which means millions of Americans suffer from them. Alzheimer’s disease, the most common type of dementia, affects approximately 6.7 million people. Parkinson’s disease, a progressive disease caused by the degeneration of nerve cells in the part of the brain that controls movement, is expected to affect 1.2 million people by 2030.
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There is no cure for either Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease, and most treatments focus on managing symptoms and maintaining quality of life. The Allen Institute team hopes its research could change this and potentially lead to targeted treatments to help eliminate diseases.
“In order to develop any kind of pharmacology or pharmacotherapeutics, or even to understand how diseases work and damage the brain and cell types, we need to understand what the basic fundamental components of the cell type are,” Brian Lee said. A senior scientist in the Allen Institute’s department of integrative cell physiology told ABC News. “So this provides people with the necessary information to start implementing some targeted approaches to correct or treat Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease.”
Lee explained that in Parkinson’s disease, there is a loss of cells in the basal ganglia circuits, which are located near the center of the brain and are responsible for controlling movement in the body.
However, it is unclear which cell type is affected by the disease. A map of brain cells may help answer this question.
“So, that’s going to be very helpful; the more we start to understand all the cell types in the brain and how different cell types are affected by diseases, we can start to take a more selective and targeted approach to treating it and hopefully eliminating it,” Lee said.
Similarly, research on Alzheimer’s has shown that certain cell types are affected at various points in the progression of the disease and in different parts of the brain, Lein said. He said the brain map could be used to map data on Alzheimer’s to determine whether and how these neuronal losses lead to cognitive decline.
“I think this is just the beginning of this field, so just like the genome, these maps will do that job, and now anyone studying any disease will be able to come in and get this high-resolution perspective of what’s happening in that disease,” Lein said. “And that’s kind of a huge accomplishment for the community, but it starts with that basic foundational atlas.”
The Allen Institute is also working on other ways to better understand the brain. Lee, for example, is working on a project that allows researchers to essentially probe or poke a single neuron and understand its functional properties. The cell is also filled with a dye to further determine its shape and function. Because there are thousands of cell types in the brain, each performing very different, complex tasks, Lee said this helps understand how each cell contributes to the structure and function of the brain.
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He added that the institute also collaborates with local neurosurgeons who, for example, have to remove healthy brain tissue from patients during surgery to get to the brain tumor in cancer patients. Researchers at the institute then collect some of these tissues and use the limited time they have while the tissues are alive to culture them and study individual neurons.
Allen Institute CEO Dr. Rui Costa said that this research not only provides a framework for further and deeper understanding of the brain, but also provides answers to what makes humans unique creatures.
“Understanding the brain is a very important thing for humans because the brain is very important to understanding who we are, what we love, what we hate, what we remember, how we act, how we feel,” he said. “Everything that makes up our personality depends, in some sense, on how our brain develops and experiences things throughout life. Therefore, understanding the brain is one of humanity’s greatest quests.”
Scientists undertake ‘moonshot’ project to map human brain in hope of combating diseases originally appeared on abcnews.go.com