Beating Alzheimer’s With Brain Waves
Written by Ed Yong
Neurons firing. Photo courtesy of The Atlantic and Picower Institute for Learning and Memory
When a crowd starts to applaud, each person initially does so to their own rhythm. But in some cases, those claps can synchronize, with hundreds or thousands or millions of hands striking in unison.
Something similar happens in the brain. When a single neuron fires, it sends an electrical pulse down its length. But large networks of neurons can also fire together, creating regular cycles of electrical activity that resemble the synchronized applause of a rapturous crowd. Formally, these are called neural oscillations; more colloquially, they’re brain waves. Read more.
Parkinson’s disease ‘may start in gut’
By James Gallagher
Health and science reporter, BBC News website
Immune cells in the brain – microglia – may be activated by bacteria in the gut. Photo courtesy of BBC News and CALTECH.
Scientists in California say they have transformed understanding of Parkinson’s disease.
Their animal experiments, published in the journal Cell, suggest the brain disorder may be caused by bacteria living in the gut.
The findings could eventually lead to new ways of treating the disease, such as drugs to kill gut bugs or probiotics.
Experts said the results opened an “exciting new avenue of study”. Read more.
Published by BBC News December 2, 2016
Rats giggle when tickled — but only when the mood is right
By ERIC BOODMAN
At parties and bars, he introduces himself as a “rat tickler.”
The title makes Shimpei Ishiyama sound like he belongs in some forgotten guild of yore, with the Victorian “pure-finders,” who collected dog dung for a living, and the “flankers and flaggers,” who kept partridges in the range of hunters’ guns.
But he is, in actual fact, a neuroscientist, and his rat-tickling is anything but antiquated. By trying to titillate these rodents — and recording how their neurons respond — Ishiyama and his adviser are unraveling a mystery that has puzzled thinkers ever since Aristotle posited that humans, given their thin skin and unique ability to laugh, were the only ticklish animals. Read more.
New tricks in canine cancer aim to treat humans, too
BY: LAURIE MCGINLEY
The Washington Post
Harley, a 4-year-old boxer who has leukemia, receives an infusion of his own T cells at the University of Pennsylvania’s Ryan Veterinary Hospital in early November. In a process also used in human trials, Harley’s cells, a key component of the immune system, have been genetically modified and multiplied to help combat his cancer. Katherine Frey The Washington Post
Flyer, a 70-pound golden retriever, lies patiently on her left side on an examination table as technicians scurry around, placing little sandbags on her legs and neck to keep her still. She’s getting chest X-rays to answer a critical question: Has a deadly bone cancer spread to her lungs?
When the session is over, Martha MaloneyHuss, a veterinarian at the University of Pennsylvania’s Ryan Veterinary Hospital, glances at the images. “I don’t see anything hugely obvious,” she says, “but we’ll see what the radiologist says.” Oblivious to the good news, Flyer hops down the hall on three legs, eager to find her owner.
After the 8-year-old retriever began limping last year, she was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, a painful, aggressive cancer that often strikes Great Danes, Irish wolfhounds and other large breeds. At Penn Vet, she got the standard treatment: One of her left legs was amputated, and she underwent chemotherapy. Read more.
Published by The Island Packet November 26, 2016
Monkeys Regain Control Of Paralyzed Legs With Help Of An Implant
Gregoire Courtine, a neurologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, holds a silicone model of a primate’s brain with an electrode array. The goal is to pick up signals from the brain and transmit them to the legs.
Photo Credit: Alain Herzog/EPFL
Written by: Rae Ellen Bichell
A few months ago, neurosurgeon Jocelyne Bloch emerged from a 10-hour surgery that she hadn’t done before.
“Most of my patients are humans,” says Bloch, who works at the Lausanne University Hospital in Switzerland.
This patient was a rhesus macaque.
The monkey’s spinal cord had been partially cut. So while his brain was fine and his legs were fine, the two couldn’t communicate.
“Normally, the brain is giving commands, and the legs are responding to the commands through the spinal cord. When you have a spinal cord lesion, then this command is interrupted,” says Bloch. Read more.
Sick Dogs Could Be Key to Unlocking Mysteries of Immunotherapy
NIH is recruiting dogs to test a new type of promising cancer drugs called immunotherapy. Photo credit: MIT Technology Review
Written by: Emily Mullin
Novel cancer drugs that harness an individual’s own immune system to fight cancer are showing incredible promise in some patients, but researchers don’t fully understand why these immunotherapies work for some people and not others.
Scientists at the National Institutes of Health say they need animal models that imitate the human immune system to study the effects of these drugs. This week an advisory committee at the National Cancer Institute at NIH said it will start a new program in 2017 to study experimental immunotherapies in dogs with cancer. The National Cancer Institute has been performing clinical trials in dogs since 2003 with other cancer therapies, but this is the first large-scale dog immunotherapy effort the institute is supporting. Read more.
Early study finds antibody that ‘neutralizes’ Zika virus
The findings may also aid efforts to develop an effective anti-Zika vaccine, said James Crowe Jr., M.D., director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Center.
Credit: Photo courtesy of Vanderbilt University Medical Center
Researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, have isolated a human monoclonal antibody that in a mouse model “markedly reduced” infection by the Zika virus.
The antibody, called ZIKV-117, also protected the fetus in pregnant mice infected with the virus, the researchers reported in the journal Nature. Zika is believed to cause microcephaly, unusually small heads, and other congenital malformations in children born to infected women.
Similar protection studies in primates are warranted, and if the findings hold up, ZIKV-177 could be developed as a protective antibody treatment for pregnant women at risk of Zika infection, the researchers concluded. Read more.
Harvard’s 3D-Printed Heart on a Chip Will Speed Up Drug Research and Make Animal Testing Safer
By: Ghuncha Shaheed
3D printing is gradually taking over the world. We’ve had 3D printed models for architecture, 3D sonic holograms, and then 3D synthetic bones to replace bones in our body. 3D printing’s potential to create such customized objects has made more advancements in the medical field than in anything else.
Harvard has now created a 3D printed organ-on-a-chip and has gotten closer to mimicking the human organs through its integrated sensors. This is particularly of use when it comes to testing the efficacy of the artificial tissue before implanting them into the human body. Read more.
Scientists Take Big Step Toward Being Able To Repair Brain Injuries
Photo Credit Sofia Grade
Embryonic neurons (shown in red) transplanted into the adult mouse brain connect with host neurons (shown in black), rebuilding neural circuits previously lost due to an injury.
Written by: Bahar Gholipour
Scientists have long been working toward a day when a traumatic injury or stroke doesn’t cause brain cells to be permanently lost.
Executing this extremely difficult task would involve figuring out how to transplant new neurons into brain tissue. But neurons form precise connections with each other, and are guided by physiological signals that are active during early brain development ― meaning that you can’t sow a fistful of new neurons into mature brain tissue and expect them to grow the way they should. Read more.
Psychological science explores the minds of dogs
Dogs are one of the most common household pets in the world, so it’s curious that we know relatively little about their cognitive abilities when we know so much about the abilities of other animals, from primates to cetaceans. Over the last couple decades, researchers have been aiming to bridge this gap in scientific knowledge, investigating how our canine companions behave and what they know and why.
The October 2016 issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science presents an entire special issue dedicated to exploring all that psychological scientists have learned about dog behavior and cognition in recent years. Current Directions in Psychological Science is a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Read more.