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 Research & Giving News Article  in Science Times August 14 Karl Deisseroth, M.D., Ph.D., an assistant professor of bioengineering and of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford and a 2005 NARSAD Young Investigator, is among those devising a variety of exciting new techniques to visualize brain circuits as the brain goes about its many tasks. In a front-page feature story in the Science Times section of the New York Times on Tuesday, August 14, Dr. Deisseroth compares the simultaneous coordination of the brain’s many parts with the blending together of many instruments in a symphony orchestra. The Times story focuses on Dr. Deisseroth’s efforts to devise technologies capable of turning specific sets of brain cells “on” and “off,” by remote control. The story speculates that at some point in the future, mature remote-control technology may make possible better treatments for neurological and psychiatric disorders. Dr. Deisseroth, who is a psychiatrist as well as a research scientist, treats autistic and severely depressed patients. He notes the paradox that in such patients, there is no obvious damage to brain cells, and yet it is evident that the way such cells communicate with one another is in some way irregular in these illnesses. His efforts to take highly detailed “movies” of brain cells as they function in depressed laboratory rats were highlighted on this NARSAD website in mid-July. Dr. Deisseroth and colleagues injected fluorescent dye, sensitive to currents flowing through brain circuits, into brain tissue. As dyed circuits lit up and darkened again in response to the brain’s electrical activity, very fast high-resolution cameras captured the action. The researchers observed how different stimuli received by the brain, such as a dose of an antidepressant drug, affected circuit operation. Those experiments indicated that depression behavior and its treatment with antidepressant drugs both appeared to manifest themselves through the same pathway in the brain’s hippocampal formation. Dr. Deisseroth commented that the findings may help to “make sense of how there can be so many different causes and treatments of depression, and also help us understand conceptually how something that seems as hard to get traction on as depression can have a really quantitative, concrete basis.” Click here to read the full story. |
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