{"337851":{"#nid":"337851","#data":{"type":"news","title":"BRAIN Initiative","body":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003ELast year, when President Barack Obama announced the BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) at the White House, Bob Guldberg and Craig Forest were in attendance, representing the Georgia Institute of Technology. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EForest, associate professor of bioengineering in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, and Bob Guldberg, executive director of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, were with about 200 other neuroscientists and neuroengineers, to witness the launch of the president\u2019s ambitious new $300 million public-private program focused on understanding the human brain. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u201cThat was a wonderful day, as the President led the invigorating charge for neuroscience research and the tools to enable it,\u201d says Forest, who is now very much in the game, playing a leading role in the new national initiative that aims to do for neuroscience what the Human Genome Project did for genomics. \u201cI can\u2019t think of anything more exciting to be part of, so I\u2019ve basically been 100 percent in from that day forward.\u201d \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EAnd last month, when the National Institutes of Health announced the first wave of BRAIN Initiative funding (totaling $46 million), Forest and his Georgia Tech colleague, Garrett Stanley (professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering), were awarded BRAIN Initiative funding from the NIH for a project entitled, \u201cIn-vivo circuit activity measurement at single cell, sub-threshold resolution.\u201d \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThey are principal investigators in a plan to use a robot (developed by Forest and his collaborator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Edward Boyden) to measure precise changes in electrical activity from individual neurons that are connected over long distances across the brain, to understand how these connections change when our brains go into different states, such as sleeping and waking. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u201cWe are leveraging a technique called \u2018patch clamping,\u2019 and it\u2019s been around for decades, but up until now, it\u2019s been done manually,\u201d says Forest, whose robotic technique takes patch clamping \u2013 the gold standard technique for measuring electrical fluctuations in cells \u2013 from a manual skill performed typically in vitro to an automated procedure performed in vivo. The success and potential of the \u2018autopatching\u2019 robot over the past year or so is the reason Forest (and Boyden) was invited to the president\u2019s announcement last year. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u201cNo one has been able to record intracellularly from neurons that are connected to each other in a living brain, and that\u2019s what we hope to do,\u201d says Forest, who figures that if his team can measure fluctuations in a healthy brain, they can study the changes that occur with Alzheimer\u2019s, or depression, or epilepsy, or with different drugs and anesthesia. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u201cWe\u2019re trying to understand the basic building blocks. It\u2019s amazing how little we know about the brain,\u201d says Forest, who is spending most of 2014 as a visiting scientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u201cAs humans, we can identify galaxies light years away, we can study particles smaller than an atom,\u201d the president told his audience last year. \u201cBut we still haven\u2019t unlocked the mystery of the three pounds of matter that sits between our ears.\u201d \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe human brain has about 86 billion neurons that make trillions of connections. But we don\u2019t know how many different cell types comprise these billions of neurons, and that leaves huge gaps in our understanding of that \u201cthree pounds of matter,\u201d a major reason why we\u2019re still unable to cure diseases like Alzheimer\u2019s, for example, or to fully reverse the effects of a stroke. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u201cIf you\u2019re building an electrical circuit, you need a battery, capacitors, resistors \u2013 you need different components. In the brain, nobody knows how many different components there are, or how they are connected,\u201d says Forest, whose research team was awarded $1.5 million from the NIH. \u201cWe still don\u2019t know how the brain is wired, how memories are stored, how the brain develops, and performs computations. So right now, that\u2019s the major thrust of this BRAIN Initiative and neuroscience, to develop a basic understanding.\u201d\u003C\/p\u003E","summary":null,"format":"limited_html"}],"field_subtitle":[{"value":"Georgia Tech researchers among part of first wave of NIH funding"}],"field_summary":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EGeorgia Tech researchers among part of first wave of NIH funding\u003C\/p\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"field_summary_sentence":[{"value":"Georgia Tech researchers among part of first wave of NIH funding"}],"uid":"27195","created_gmt":"2014-10-29 08:06:20","changed_gmt":"2016-10-08 03:17:23","author":"Colly Mitchell","boilerplate_text":"","field_publication":"","field_article_url":"","dateline":{"date":"2014-10-29T00:00:00-04:00","iso_date":"2014-10-29T00:00:00-04:00","tz":"America\/New_York"},"extras":[],"hg_media":{"337861":{"id":"337861","type":"image","title":"Craig Forest","body":null,"created":"1449245216","gmt_created":"2015-12-04 16:06:56","changed":"1475895051","gmt_changed":"2016-10-08 02:50:51","alt":"Craig Forest","file":{"fid":"200563","name":"forest-square.jpg","image_path":"\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/forest-square_0.jpg","image_full_path":"http:\/\/www.tlwarc.hg.gatech.edu\/\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/forest-square_0.jpg","mime":"image\/jpeg","size":2929667,"path_740":"http:\/\/www.tlwarc.hg.gatech.edu\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/740xx_scale\/public\/images\/forest-square_0.jpg?itok=oO4hazUy"}},"337871":{"id":"337871","type":"image","title":"Garrett Stanley","body":null,"created":"1449245216","gmt_created":"2015-12-04 16:06:56","changed":"1475895051","gmt_changed":"2016-10-08 02:50:51","alt":"Garrett Stanley","file":{"fid":"200564","name":"stanleygarrett2.jpg","image_path":"\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/stanleygarrett2_0.jpg","image_full_path":"http:\/\/www.tlwarc.hg.gatech.edu\/\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/stanleygarrett2_0.jpg","mime":"image\/jpeg","size":94808,"path_740":"http:\/\/www.tlwarc.hg.gatech.edu\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/740xx_scale\/public\/images\/stanleygarrett2_0.jpg?itok=VLLK2g7C"}}},"media_ids":["337861","337871"],"related_links":[{"url":"http:\/\/pbl.gatech.edu\/","title":"Forest lab"},{"url":"https:\/\/stanley.gatech.edu\/","title":"Stanley laboratory"}],"groups":[{"id":"1292","name":"Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience (IBB)"}],"categories":[{"id":"42941","name":"Art Research"},{"id":"134","name":"Student and Faculty"}],"keywords":[],"core_research_areas":[],"news_room_topics":[],"event_categories":[],"invited_audience":[],"affiliations":[],"classification":[],"areas_of_expertise":[],"news_and_recent_appearances":[],"phone":[],"contact":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003E\u003Ca href=\u0022mailto:jerry.grillo@ibb.gatech.edu\u0022\u003EJerry Grillo\u003C\/a\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ECommunications Officer II\u003Cbr \/\u003EParker H. Petit Institute for\u003Cbr \/\u003EBioengineering \u0026amp; Bioscience\u003C\/p\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"email":["jerry.grillo@ibb.gatech.edu"],"slides":[],"orientation":[],"userdata":""}}}