Institute News: Announcements

The National Institutes of Health announced today its first wave of investments totaling $46 million in fiscal year 14 funds to support the goals of the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative. More than 100 investigators in 15 states and several countries will work to develop new tools and technologies to understand neural circuit function and capture a dynamic view of the brain in action. These new tools and this deeper understanding will ultimately catalyze new treatments and cures for devastating brain disorders and diseases that are estimated by the World Health Organization to affect more than one billion people worldwide. Six MIT projects were funded, including four projects led by McGovern Institute researchers.

“The human brain is the most complicated biological structure in the known universe. We’ve only just scratched the surface in understanding how it works — or, unfortunately, doesn’t quite work when disorders and disease occur,” said NIH Director Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D. “There’s a big gap between what we want to do in brain research and the technologies available to make exploration possible. These initial awards are part of a 12-year scientific plan focused on developing the tools and technologies needed to make the next leap in understanding the brain. This is just the beginning of an ambitious journey and we’re excited about the possibilities.”

Creating a wearable scanner to image the human brain in motion, using lasers to guide nerve cell firing, recording the entire nervous system in action, stimulating specific circuits with radio waves, and identifying complex circuits with DNA barcodes are among the 58 projects announced today. The majority of the grants focus on developing transformative technologies that will accelerate fundamental neuroscience research and include:

• classifying the myriad cell types in the brain
• producing tools and techniques for analyzing brain cells and circuits
• creating next-generation human brain imaging technology
• developing methods for large-scale recordings of brain activity
• integrating experiments with theories and models to understand the functions of specific brain circuits

“How do the billions of cells in our brain control our thoughts, feelings, and movements? That’s ultimately what the BRAIN Initiative is about,” said Thomas R. Insel, M.D., director of the NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health. “Understanding this will greatly help us meet the rising challenges that brain disorders pose for the future health of the nation.”

Last year, President Obama launched the BRAIN Initiative as a large-scale effort to equip researchers with fundamental insights necessary for treating a wide variety of brain disorders like Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, autism, epilepsy, and traumatic brain injury. Four federal agencies — NIH, the National Science Foundation, the Food and Drug Administration and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — stepped up to the “grand challenge” and committed more than $110 million to the Initiative for fiscal year 2014. Planning for the NIH component of the BRAIN initiative is guided by the long-term scientific plan, “BRAIN 2025: A Scientific Vision” that details seven high-priority research areas.

Later today, the White House is hosting a conference on the BRAIN Initiative where new Federal and private sector commitments will be unveiled in support of this ambitious and important effort.

“We are at a critical juncture for brain research, and these audacious projects are from some of the brightest researchers in neuroscience collaborating with physicists and engineers,” said Story Landis, Ph.D., director of the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

For a list of all the projects, please visit: http://braininitiative.nih.gov/nih-brain-awards.htm

For more information about the BRAIN Initiative, please visit: http://www.nih.gov/science/brain/

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About the National Institutes of Health (NIH): NIH, the nation’s medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit http://www.nih.gov.

July 10, 2014: Massachusetts Secretary of Education Matthew Malone (center) visits the McGovern Institute to learn more about dyslexia research in the Gabrieli lab. Photo: Julie Pryor

Patrick McGovern was born in 1937 in Queens, New York, and grew up in New York and Philadelphia. He became interested in the brain as a teenager, when he came across a book titled “Giant Brains, or Machines that Think” in the Philadelphia public library. As he recalled in an interview some 50 years later, “It was the first book that talked about computers and their role as an amplifier of the human mind,” and it sparked a lifelong interest in science and technology. In 1955 Pat was admitted to MIT, where he majored in biophysics. He studied neurophysiology, and recalls using a glass electrode to study electrical activity in tadpoles. He also became involved in student newspapers, and after graduating from MIT in the class of 1959, he was hired as an assistant editor for a new magazine, “Computers and Automation,” founded by Ed Berkeley, the author of the book that had so intrigued him ten years earlier.

After four years as a magazine editor, Pat left to found his own company, now known as International Data Group (IDG), which under his leadership grew to become the world’s foremost publisher of computer-related news, information and research. IDG today is a multi-billion-dollar business, with 2013 revenues of over $3.5 billion. The story of Pat’s career at IDG has been often told, and his business accomplishments have been recognized with many honors, including lifetime achievement awards from American Business Media and from the Magazine Publishers of America. Yet despite his success and his imposing physical presence, Pat retained a modest demeanor and never cultivated the trappings of great wealth. Instead, he focused his energies on leadership of the company (of which he remained chairman until the time of his death) and increasingly in his later years, on his philanthropic priorities.

His career and fortune were made in computer technology, but never lost sight of his early dream to understand the brain, which he often described as the world’s most complex computer. When he studied neurophysiology at MIT in the 1950s, the tools were not adequate to the enormous challenge of understanding how the human brain works, but by the 1990s, technological progress had been so dramatic that the field had been transformed almost beyond recognition. A scientific understanding of the brain, while still a daunting challenge, was no longer within the realm of science fiction, but was a real prospect for the future.

Pat’s dream was shared by his wife Lore Harp McGovern, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur whose interests included healthcare, education and hi-tech. In the late 1990s they decided that the time was right to establish a new institute for brain research, and after consultations with many leading scientists and universities, they decided that the new institute would be at MIT.

Pat and Lore had both been longstanding MIT supporters; Pat was a member of the MIT Corporation, and Lore was chair of the Board of Associates at the affiliated Whitehead Institute. But they always emphasized that their choice of MIT was not simply a matter of loyalty to Pat’s alma mater. They felt that MIT was the right choice because of its alignment with their vision of a multidisciplinary, outward-looking institute that would engage the widest possible range of scientific talents in support of its mission to understand the brain. One goal was to understand the basis of brain disorders and to lay the foundation for new treatments for conditions such as psychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases – a goal that Pat and Lore considered vitally important, given the enormous suffering and economic costs that are inflicted by these disorders. But their vision was not confined to disease research; they also understood the brain to be the source of our humanity, our creative achievements and our conflicts, and they saw the possibility that understanding these things in scientific terms could transform the world for the better.

The McGovern Institute for Brain Research was formally established in 2000, with a commitment of $350 million from Pat and Lore, one of the largest philanthropic gifts in the history of higher education. Nobel laureate and Institute Professor Phillip A. Sharp, was named founding director, and Robert Desimone succeeded Sharp as director in 2004. In the fall of 2005, the McGovern Institute moved into spacious facilities in MIT’s Brain and Cognitive Sciences Complex, one of the most distinctive landmarks on the MIT campus and among the largest neuroscience research buildings in the world.

The McGovern Institute has continued to thrive since it moved to its new home, expanding in size and scope as it has hired new faculty and built new laboratories. Most importantly, it has produced a steady stream of discoveries about the working of the brain, in areas ranging from the genetic control of brain development to the neural basis of human thought and emotion. This progress was deeply gratifying to Pat and Lore, who visited regularly to attend the institute’s board meetings and scientific events, mingling with faculty and researchers and engaging deeply in discussions of their new findings. Throughout his life, Pat retained an extraordinary ability to absorb new information, and researchers were frequently impressed at his ability to cite detailed facts and figures about the brain. He was a tireless advocate for the institute and its mission, hosting many visits and tours, and inspiring others to follow his philanthropic example. He was, and Lore remains, an enormous source of inspiration and encouragement to the researchers at the institute.

Throughout Pat’s business career, his vision was global, and he took great pride in the fact that IDG was one of the first Western companies to establish a business presence in China after the end of the Cultural Revolution. It is thus fitting that Pat and Lore’s philanthropic vision also extended to China; since 2011, three new IDG/McGovern Institutes have been established in Beijing, at Tsinghua University, Peking (“Beida”) University and Beijing Normal University.

Like the McGovern Institute at MIT, the new institutes in China are focused on fundamental research in neuroscience as well as translational work on disease applications. Pat always saw brain disorders as global problems that required global solutions, and one of his greatest hopes was that the new institutes would help accelerate the international cooperation that he saw as essential to the ultimate goal of understanding the human brain in health and disease.

Pat’s wife Lore has been a full partner throughout the McGovern Institute’s 14-year history, serving on the governing board of the institute along with Pat and his daughter Elizabeth McGovern. All of us at the institute offer our deepest condolences to Lore, to their four children, and to all of Pat’s family members and friends. He will be greatly missed.

See below for a photo gallery of Pat McGovern.

Photos: Justin Knight

The McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT announced today that Huda Y. Zoghbi, of Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital, is the winner of the 2014 Edward M. Scolnick Prize in Neuroscience. The Prize is awarded annually by the McGovern Institute to recognize outstanding advances in the field of neuroscience.

“Huda Zoghbi has been a pioneer in the study of human genetic disease,” says Robert Desimone, director of the McGovern Institute and chair of the selection committee. “Her work has provided fundamental insights into the mechanisms of hereditary neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric diseases, and has pointed the way to new treatments for these disorders.”

Zoghbi studied medicine in her native Lebanon and later in the US, where she specialized in pediatric neurology. Following her residency she trained as a molecular geneticist with Arthur Beaudet at Baylor College of Medicine, where she became a faculty member in 1988. She is currently an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Zoghbi’s first major scientific contribution was the identification in 1993 of the gene responsible for spinocerebellar ataxia type 1 (SCA1), a progressive neurodegenerative disease with an unusual pattern of inheritance. In collaboration with Harry Orr at the University of Minnesota, Zoghbi showed that SCA1, like Huntington’s disease, is caused by a pathological expansion of a repeated three-nucleotide sequence. The more times this is repeated, the earlier the onset of disease and the more severe the symptoms. The number of repeats can increase from one generation to the next, meaning that children are often more severely affected than the parent. Zoghbi continues to study SCA1, and her recent work has focused on identifying genetic factors that slow the progression of the disease, a strategy that she hopes will also be applicable to other neurodegenerative disorders.

Zoghbi is perhaps best known for her pioneering work on Rett syndrome, a genetic neurological disease that affects young girls (males with the condition usually die in infancy). Girls born with the disease develop normally for one or two years, but then begin to show progressive loss of motor skills, speech, and other cognitive abilities.

Zoghbi first encountered children with Rett syndrome during her residency, and decided to search for its genetic cause. This was a challenging task; the disease was not widely recognized at the time and was often misdiagnosed, and family studies were difficult because the majority of cases were caused by isolated sporadic mutations. Zoghbi persisted despite these challenges, and after a 16-year search, she succeeded in identifying the Rett gene in 1999. This discovery provided a definitive genetic diagnosis for the condition, and also opened the door to a biological understanding and a search for treatment. Zoghbi demonstrated that Rett syndrome is caused by deficiency in a protein called MeCP2, which binds methylated DNA and regulates the expression of many other genes. The gene lies on the X chromosome, and in females one of the two X chromosomes is randomly inactivated in each cell; thus each patient with the Rett mutation has a different pattern of healthy and mutant cells, explaining some of the variability of Rett symptoms.

Identification of the Rett gene allowed researchers to make equivalent mutations in mouse models, which develop progressive neurological symptoms strikingly similar to those of human patients. This in turn laid the groundwork for further studies by Zoghbi and many other labs, and to the development of new therapeutic strategies that are now undergoing clinical trials.

The implications of this work extend beyond Rett syndrome (a relatively rare condition). Many Rett patients show symptoms of autism, and one hope is that understanding these symptoms may lead to new treatments that will be effective not only for people with Rett syndrome but also for other more common cases of autism. Zoghbi’s recent work has focused on identifying the cell types and brain circuits that are responsible for the autistic-like behaviors of the mouse Rett model, which may represent promising targets for future therapeutic intervention.

In addition to running her own laboratory, Zoghbi is the founding director of the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children’s Hospital. She has received numerous awards and honors for her work, including election to both the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences.
The McGovern Institute will award the Scolnick Prize to Dr. Zoghbi on Wednesday April 30, 2014. At 4:00 pm she will deliver a lecture entitled “A neural tipping point: MeCP2 and neuropsychiatric disorders,” to be followed by a reception, at the McGovern Institute in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Complex, 43 Vassar Street (building 46, room 3002) in Cambridge. The event is free and open to the public.

About the Edward M. Scolnick Prize in Neuroscience:
The Scolnick Prize, awarded annually by the McGovern Institute, is named in honor of Dr. Edward M. Scolnick, who stepped down as President of Merck Research Laboratories in December 2002 after holding Merck’s top research post for 17 years. Dr. Scolnick is now a core member of the Broad Institute, where he is chief scientist at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research. He also serves as a member of the McGovern Institute’s governing board. The prize, which is endowed through a gift from Merck to the McGovern Institute, consists of a $100,000 award, plus an inscribed gift. Previous winners are Thomas Jessell (Columbia University), Roger Nicoll (University of California, San Francisco), Bruce McEwen (Rockefeller University), Lily and Yuh-Nung Jan (University of California, San Francisco), Jeremy Nathans (Johns Hopkins University), Michael Davis (Emory University), David Julius (University of California, San Francisco), Michael Greenberg (Harvard Medical School), Judith Rapoport (National Institute of Mental Health) and Mark Konishi (California Institute of Technology).