TCCI Holiday Newsletter 2023



	中文

Dear Friends,

Happy holidays! As we quickly approach the end of 2023, we wish you all the best. It has been a remarkable year for the Chen Institute, and we are grateful for the ongoing commitment of our partners, new and old.

As always, we invite you to look through the latest news, research and meetings listed below and thank you for your ongoing support and interest.

Warm wishes,

Tianqiao Chen Chrissy Luo

NEWS

Viviana Gradinaru Named Director of the Merkin Institute

Congratulations to Viviana Gradinaru, the Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Neuroscience and Biological Engineering and director of the Center for Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience at the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience at Caltech, who has been named the new director and Allen V. C. Davis and Lenabelle Davis Leadership Chair of the Richard N. Merkin Institute for Translational Research (MITR).

SUPPORTING THE COMMUNITY

We support and create scientific meetings around the world. You can learn more about past and future meetings here.

Cancun, Mexico
February 8-11, 2024

Neurogenesis

New Orleans
Deccember 11-15, 2023

NeurIPS

MEETING REPORTS

Our Chen Science Writer Fellows do a great job summarizing the top topics and new trends presented at the meetings TCCI® supports throughout the year. The most recent reports are below and you can browse more here.

Towards the Galaxy of Neuroscience – The 46th Annual Meeting of the Japan Neuroscience Society

A key to assembling materials on the surface of live neurons

From Science Fiction to Reality, How Do Brain-Computer Interfaces Connect Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence?

FENS - Chen Institute - NeuroLéman Summer School on Motor control: from thought to action

RESEARCH

Attention, Focus, and a High Risk of Alzheimer’s

A team from Caltech and the Huntington Medical Research Institutes is currently conducting an ongoing project to develop a simple behavioral test to detect a person’s Alzheimer’s risk, as noninvasive as solving a puzzle on the computer. In 2022, the team developed a behavioral test whose results accurately correlated with spinal fluid measurements.

Ultrasound Enables Less-Invasive Brain–Machine Interfaces

Brain–machine interfaces (BMIs) are devices that can read brain activity and translate that activity to control an electronic device like a prosthetic arm or computer cursor. Many BMIs require invasive surgeries to implant electrodes into the brain to read neural activity. However, in 2021, Caltech researchers developed a way to read brain activity using functional ultrasound (fUS), a much less invasive technique. Now, a new study is a proof-of-concept that fUS technology can be the basis for an “online” BMI—one that reads brain activity, deciphers its meaning with decoders programmed with machine learning, and consequently controls a computer that can accurately predict movement with very minimal delay time.

Newly Discovered Brain Circuit Controls an Aversion to Salty Tastes

Having the right amount of sodium in your body is so crucial, in fact, that parts of your brain work hard to make sure you’re getting the salt that you need. If you’ve ever been hit by a sudden craving for potato chips, that may have been your brain at work. On the other hand, if you’re thirsty, salted snacks might sound like the last thing you to eat. Now, new research from Caltech scientists is showing us more about how the brain regulates when the flavor of salt is yuck or yum.

Successful deep brain electrode implantation for OCD patient

On October 19, a neurosurgery team led by Chen Liang, a researcher at the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute and a professor at Fudan University-affiliated Huashan Hospital, collaborated with a functional neurosurgery team from the Shanghai Mental Health Center affiliated with the School of Medicine at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, to successfully perform deep brain electrode implantation for a young obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) patient at Shanghai Mental Health Center.

New marker for early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease

An international, multicenter study led by Professor Jintai Yu, a researcher at the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute and a professor of neurology at Fudan University-affiliated Huashan Hospital, has found that increased volume of the sublateral ventricles is a genetic imaging marker of Alzheimer’s disease, and can be used to predict the risk of Alzheimer’s disease at an early stage, independent of traditional imaging markers such as hippocampal volume. The study was recently published in the journal Nature.

New neurosurgical technique: deep brain tumor resection with 3D exoscopy

A team led by Mao Ying, president of Fudan University-affiliated Huashan Hospital and director of the TCCI Translational Center, and Professor Zhu Wei from the Neurosurgery Department of Fudan University-affiliated Huashan Hospital, reported 25 cases of pineal region tumor resection with 3D exoscopy via infratentorial approach, which achieved satisfactory clinical outcomes.

Stanford Researchers Develop Molecularly Imprinted Polymers for Continual, Real-time Sensing of Dopamine for Health Monitoring

In a recent paper published in ACS Nano, a team of researchers led by Professor Nicholas Melosh and Dr. Nofar Mintz Hemed in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford University describe their innovative, dopamine-binding molecularly imprinted polymers (MIP) that have a limit of detection in the sub-nanomolar range and does not require as complex a fabrication process. With continued development of the sensor, it may be integrated with wireless electronics and used for long term monitoring of physiology.

Unique evolutionary pathways during recurrence of different gliomas

Glioma recurrence has long plagued patients and neurosurgeons however with the development of molecular diagnosis of glioma, research recently published in the journal Nature, has become increasingly precise. A recent study by Mao Ying, President of Fudan University-affiliated Huashan Hospital and Director of TCCI Translational Center, and Professor Hua Wei from the Neurosurgery Department of Fudan University-affiliated Huashan Hospital, has revealed the unique evolutionary pathways in the progression of glioma recurrence in astrocytomas and glioblastomas which is of great significance in guiding the treatment approach during recurrence.

Drug Delivery Platform Uses Sound for Targeting

Chemotherapy as a treatment for cancer is one of the major medical success stories of the 20th century, but it’s far from perfect. Anyone who has been through chemotherapy will be familiar with its many side effects. The treatment is meant to kill cancer cells by poisoning them, but since cancer cells derive from healthy cells, it is difficult to create a drug that kills them without also harming healthy tissue. Now a pair of Caltech research teams have created an entirely new kind of drug-delivery system, one that they say may finally give doctors the ability to treat cancer in a more targeted way. The system employs drugs that are activated by ultrasound—and only right where they are needed in the body.

“Invisible” Cell Types and Gene Expression Revealed with Sequencing Data Analysis Improvement

In 2018, researchers in the Caltech laboratory of Yuki Oka, Chen Scholar, professor of biology and HMRI, made a major discovery: they identified a type of neuron, or brain cell, that mediates thirst satiation. But they ran into a problem: a state-of-the-art technique called single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) could not find those thirst-related neurons in samples of brain tissue that were known to contain them. Identifying different cell types is critical to understanding the vast number of functions performed by our bodies, from healthy processes like sensing thirst to cellular malfunction in disease states. Determining the precise cell types involved in such processes is critical for all of these studies. Now, a collaboration between the Oka laboratory at Caltech and the laboratory of Allan-Hermann Pool has demonstrated how to optimize a key step in scRNA-seq analysis to recover missing cell types and gene expression data that usually gets discarded.