Highlights from The Neurotech Investing and Partnering Conference 2010: Translational Researchers Showcase Innovation

        While venture capitalists have been dialing back on potentially risky early stage investments, translational researchers have been marching ahead. Government funding is pushing new discoveries forward, but sometimes the best of these languish in academic labs where companies and more adventurous investors are less likely to discover them. This year the Neurotech Development Foundation (NDF), a new nonprofit founded to promote the advancement of translational neuroscience research, and several institutes at the NIH (including NINDS, NIMH, and NIA) teamed up to find and showcase the most promising work to Neurotech 2010 attendees in Boston on May 20, 2010.  
         The projects were selected by a steering committee including industry, government and academic representatives.

Rendezvous in Hedonia

Psychiatrist Morten Kringelbach: Our basic pleasures are caused by feelings intimately related to food, sex and social interaction. On a neural level, such sensations are first detected by sensory receptors located throughout the body. These are then decoded in the sensory regions of the brain.  Pleasure is not just a mere stimulation of such receptors, but the result of interactions between anticipation, evaluation and stored away sensations.

Pleasure can therefore be seen as a sweet mix of desire, pleasant sensations and learning.

Understanding the nature of pleasure will help to treat affective disorders.

Discovering the Virtues of a Wandering Mind

Dr. Schooler ( University of California, Santa Barbara.): For creativity you need your mind to wander, but you also need to be able to notice that you’re mind wandering and catch the idea when you have it. If Archimedes had come up with a solution in the bathtub but didn’t notice he’d had the idea, what good would it have done him?

Creativity and schizophrenia use similar brain canals

Researchers at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have discovered that the brains of healthy, highly creative people are similar to that of schizophrenic patients in some aspects: in both cases, the dopamine system is involved.

Neuroscience: Stressed out females

Stress-related psychiatric disorders such as depression affect more women than men, and researchers have discovered a possible molecular basis for this in rats.
Debra Bangasser at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania and her colleagues put male and female rats through stressful swim tests. They then looked at changes in signalling by the receptor for corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF), which mediates stress responses in the brain. Excessive CRF activity is thought to contribute to depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
In unstressed females, the team found greater coupling of the receptor to a key protein — an important step in CRF signalling — than in unstressed males. Moreover, female rats' neurons did not internalize these receptors in response to stress — a mechanism for lowering the cells' sensitivity to stress signals — whereas those in males did. These findings, the authors say, are consistent with previous work suggesting that females are more sensitive to low levels of CRF.

Promise Seen for Detection of Alzheimer’s

Five years ago, Dr. Skovronsky, who named his company Avid in part because that is what he is, had taken a big personal and professional gamble. He left academia and formed Avid Radiopharmaceuticals, based in Philadelphia, to develop his radioactive dye and designed a study with hospice patients to prove it worked.
Hospice patients were going to die soon and so, he reasoned, why not ask them to have scans and then brain autopsies afterward to see if the scans showed just what a pathologist would see. Some patients would be demented, others not.
Some predicted his study would be impossible, if not unethical. But the F.D.A. said it wanted proof that the plaque on PET scans was the same as plaque in a brain autopsy.

Avid, tiny start-up company might have overcome one of the biggest obstacles in diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease. It had found a dye and a brain scan that, he said, can show the hallmark plaque building up in the brains of people with the disease. The findings, which will be presented at an international meeting of the Alzheimer’s Association in Honolulu on July 11, must still be confirmed and approved by the Food and Drug Administration. But if they hold up, it will mean that for the first time doctors would have a reliable way to diagnose the presence of Alzheimer’s in patients with memory problems.

Hallucinations in Hospital Pose Risk to Elderly

...The cause of delirium is unclear, but there are many apparent triggers: infections, surgery, pneumonia, and procedures like catheter insertions, all of which can spur anxiety in frail, vulnerable patients. Some medications, difficult for older people to metabolize, seem associated with delirium...

...Other triggers involve disorienting changes: sleep interrupted for tests, isolation, changing rooms, being without eyeglasses or dentures. Medication triggers can include some antihistamines, sleeping pills, antidepressants and drugs for nausea and ulcers...

...Delirium is sometimes treated with antipsychotics, but doctors urge caution using such drugs.
Delirium can wax and wane, not always causing aggressive agitation...

...People with dementia seem at greater risk for delirium, but many delirious patients have no dementia. For some of them, delirium increases the risk of later dementia. In such cases, it is unclear if delirium caused the dementia, or was simply a signal that the person would develop it later...

...Some hospitals are adopting delirium-prevention programs, including one developed by Dr. Inouye, which adjusts schedules, light and noise to help patients sleep, ensures that patients have their eyeglasses and hearing aids, and has them walk, exercise and do cognitive activities like word games...