A team of researchers from the Allen Institute in the United States have begun the process of mapping the 86 billion neurons in the human brain to help better understand how the brain works the way it does, writes ABC News.
The Allen Institute, founded by Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Paul Allen in 2003, was originally created to map gene activity in mouse brains, but researchers quickly began to include human brain studies in their work. The nonprofit is home to hundreds of researchers who, in large teams, launch aspirational “moonshot” projects that could help solve the biggest questions about diseases that affect millions of people.
“It does things a little bit differently than other research institutions,” Dr. Rui Costa, president and CEO of the Allen Institute, told ABC News. “We do big moonshot projects in the life sciences that sometimes take 10, 15 years, where teams of interdisciplinary scientists answer a particular question, and then we share openly with the world.”
Costa says these projects lay the foundation for fundamental work that can be used by other institutions. However, they are extremely complex and need to be carried out on a large scale, which requires either a multidisciplinary team or even larger consortia.
Dr. Ed Lein, principal investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, said that tools have only recently emerged that allow researchers to make high-resolution maps of the brain, which in turn can provide complete descriptions of all the cells that compose this organ.
He says these maps, described as a “Moonshot” project, will be akin to sequencing a genome, which – when complete – describes a person’s entire genetic makeup.
“This becomes a very powerful reference not only for understanding the normal brain, but also for understanding disease,” Lein told ABC News. “So we also have major efforts to try to understand Alzheimer’s disease and the really specific cell types that may be vulnerable in the disease, as well as to try to create new tools that can target specific cell types that can actually be useful for gene therapies. “
“For example, if we can identify vulnerable cell types, we can now develop screening tools to start targeting them,” Lein said. “And so it’s a whole new area of research that’s been opened up by new technologies.”
There are hundreds of brain diseases, which means millions of Americans suffer from them. Alzheimer’s disease, which is the most common type of dementia, affects about 6.7 million people. Parkinson’s disease, a progressive condition 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.
Neither Alzheimer’s disease nor Parkinson’s disease has a cure, and most treatments focus on managing symptoms and maintaining quality of life. The Allen Institute team hopes their research will change that and eventually lead to targeted therapies to help eliminate these diseases.
“To develop any kind of pharmacology or pharmacotherapy, or even to understand how diseases work and how they damage the brain and cell types, we need to understand what the basic components of the cell type are,” he told ABC News Dr. Brian Lee, senior research fellow in the Department of Integrative Cell Physiology at the Allen Institute. “So this provides this information for people to start making some targeted approaches to repair or treat Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s.”
Lee explained that in Parkinson’s disease, there is a loss of cells in the basal ganglia circuits, located near the center of the brain and responsible for controlling movements in the body.
However, it is not clear which types of cells are affected by the disease. A map of brain cells could help answer this question.
“So it’s going to be very helpful, as we begin to better understand all the cell types in the brain and how different cell types are affected by the disease, we can begin to take a much more selective and targeted approach to to treat it and hopefully eliminate it,” Lee said.
Lein said that similarly with Alzheimer’s disease, research has shown that certain types of cells are affected at different times in the course of the disease and in different regions of the brain. He said the brain map can be used to map Alzheimer’s data to determine if and how this neuronal loss leads to cognitive decline.
“I think this is just the beginning of this field, so just like the genome, these maps are going to have that role, so now anyone studying any disease can come and get this high-resolution view of what’s going on in that disease,” Lein said. “And so it’s kind of a big community moonshot here, but it starts with this basic fundamental atlas.”
The Allen Institute is also working on other ways to try to gain a better understanding of the brain. For example, Lee is working on a project that allows researchers to probe, or essentially probe, a single neuron to 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, all performing complex and vastly different tasks, Lee said this helps to understand how each cell contributes to the brain’s makeup and function.
He added that the institute also collaborated with local neurosurgeons who often have to remove healthy brain tissue from patients during surgery, such as for cancer patients to reach a brain tumor. 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 Executive Director Dr. Rui Costa said that this research not only sets a framework for a deeper and more in-depth understanding of the brain, but also provides answers to what makes humans unique.
“Understanding the brain is something very important to humans because the brain is central to who we are, what we love, what we hate, what we remember, how we behave, how we feel,” he said. “Everything that makes up our personality, in a way, depends on how our brain develops, and it experiences things throughout life. So understanding the brain is one of humanity’s great quests.”
2024-03-16 10:16:58
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