Shining a light on brains — and injury

May 11, 2010, 1:02 a.m.
Shining a light on brains -- and injury
A collaboration between Stanford and three other schools may generate more knowledge on the brain. (HARRISON TRUONG)

Patients suffering from brain injury may have new hope thanks to a project by Stanford and three other universities studying how the brain and its microcircuitry react to sudden physiological changes. The findings from a new Stanford-led study are expected to shed more light on how to encourage recovery from injury.

The project, dubbed REPAIR (Reorganization and Plasticity to Accelerate Injury Recovery), has received $14.9 million in federal funding. Spanning fields from electrical engineering to neuroscience to machine learning, REPAIR will be conducted by Stanford researchers alongside 10 other researchers and their teams from Brown University, UC-San Francisco and University College London.

By genetically engineering specific cells in a mouse’s brain to be responsive to lights, scientists can temporarily shut off specific parts of the brains of research animals using quick bursts of light. This simulates injuries that enable the researchers to study how the brain can work around damaged tissue, Karl Deisseroth, a REPAIR researcher and professor of bioengineering, told the Stanford Report.

Although the technique, called “optogenetics,” is still far from human applications, it allows researchers to test brain function and cell behavior in a living animal.

“There are many advantages to using optogenetics instead of drugs or lesions,” Deisseroth said. “You are in no way injuring the animals, because as soon as you turn the light off they are back to normal, and it is also a lot cheaper, easier and more precise to use.”

Traditional treatments for brain injury are limited to drugs and behavioral therapy, approaches that are limited in their effectiveness and specificity. The potential treatments that can arise from this project, however, are more efficient because they can target specific parts of the brain. REPAIR researchers hope to reroute brain signals around damaged areas of the brain, much in the way heart bypass surgery can correct damaged blood vessels.

The work of REPAIR requires a wide breadth of skills that each of these researchers contribute through their collaboration — an effort aided by e-mail communication, conference calls and periodic visits, wrote Maneesh Sahani in an e-mail to The Daily. Sahani is a University College London reader and has an ongoing professorship with the electrical engineering department at Stanford.

“It would, quite simply, be impossible for any single lab to achieve what we have set out to do collectively,” Sahani said. “It’s only by putting together all of these different fields and talents that we can hope to make substantial progress on a project like this.”

The federal funding comes from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), run by the U.S. Department of Defense. Many American troops have suffered brain injuries during service overseas.

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