For many other researchers, creating a map of the 86 billion neurons, or nerve cells, that make up the brain would be considered an almost insurmountable project. However, researchers at the Allen Institute are pursuing just that task and say it will lay the foundation for a better understanding of how the brain functions the way it does.
Founded by Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Paul Allen in 2003, the Allen Institute was originally founded to map gene activity in the mouse brain, but researchers soon began incorporating studies of the human brain into their work. The nonprofit is home to hundreds of researchers who, in large teams, are launching ambitious "moonshot" projects that could help solve the biggest questions about diseases affecting millions of Americans.
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"It does things a little 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 last ten to fifteen years, where teams of interdisciplinary scientists answer a specific question, and then we share openly with the world."
Costa says these projects produce foundational work that can be used by other institutions. However, they are extremely complex and need to be carried out on a large scale, requiring a multidisciplinary team or even larger consortia.
Dr. Ed Lein, a senior researcher at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, said the tools only recently existed to allow researchers to create high-resolution maps of the brain, which in turn could provide complete descriptions of all the cells that make up the brain . the organ.
He says the maps, described as a moonshot project, will be similar to sequencing a genome, which - when completed - will describe the entire genetic makeup of a person.
"That's going to be a very powerful reference point, not only for understanding the normal brain, but also for understanding disease," Lein told ABC News. "So we've also made a big effort to understand Alzheimer's disease, and the really specific types of cells that can be vulnerable in disease, and to create new tools that can target certain cell types that can actually be useful for genes. " therapies."
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"For example, if we can identify the vulnerable types of cells, we can now develop tools to check whether we can target them," Lein noted. "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, the most common form of dementia, affects approximately 6.7 million people. Parkinson's disease, a progressive condition caused by 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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Neither Alzheimer's nor Parkinson's disease can be cured, and most treatments are aimed at managing symptoms and maintaining quality of life. The Allen Institute team hopes its research can change that and possibly lead to targeted therapies that help eliminate the diseases.
"To develop any type of pharmacology or pharmacotherapeutics, or even to understand how diseases work and how they harm the brain and cell types, we need to understand what the basic core components of the cell type are," says Dr. Brian Lee. a senior scientist in the Allen Institute's department of integrative cell physiology, told ABC News. "So this provides the information that allows people to start taking some targeted approaches to resolve or treat Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease."
Lee explained that in Parkinson's disease, cells are lost in the basal ganglia circuits, located near the center of the brain and responsible for controlling movements in the body.
However, it is unclear which types of cells are affected by the disease. A map of the brain cells could help answer this question.
"So it's going to be super helpful, the better we start to understand all the cell types in the brain and how different cell types are affected by disease, we can start to take a more selected and targeted approach to treating it." and hopefully eliminating it," Lee said.
Lein said similarly: For Alzheimer's disease, research has shown that specific types of cells are affected at different points in the progression of the disease and in different parts of the brain. He said the brain map could be used to map data on Alzheimer's disease to determine if 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 fill this role so that now anyone who studies a disease can get this high-resolution perspective on what's happening in that disease," said Lein. "And so it's kind of a big community moonshot here, but it starts with this basic foundational atlas."
The Allen Institute is also working on other ways to better understand the brain. For example, Lee is working on a project that will allow researchers to essentially probe or prod 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 vastly different, complex tasks, Lee says this helps understand how each cell contributes to the brain's composition and function.
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He added that the institute has also collaborated with local neurosurgeons who often have to remove healthy brain tissue from patients during operations, such as in cancer patients to reach a brain tumor. Researchers at the institute then collect some of those tissues and use the limited time they have while the tissues are still alive to grow them and study individual neurons.
CEO of the Allen Institute, Dr. Rui Costa, said this research not only provides a framework for further and deeper understanding of the brain, but also provides answers to what makes humans unique beings.
"Understanding the brain is something very important for humans because the brain is essential to who we are, what we love, what we hate, what we remember, how we behave and how we feel," he said . "Everything that makes our personality depends in some way on how our brain evolves and how it experiences things throughout life. So understanding the brain is one of humanity's great quests."
Scientists are launching a 'moonshot' project to map the human brain in the hope of combating disease. Originally published on abcnews.go.com
