DBBS faculty member Lihong Wang receives $3.8 million NIH Director’s Pioneer Award.

Lihong Wang, PhD, has received a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s Pioneer Award to explore novel imaging techniques using light that promise significant improvements in biomedical imaging and light therapy.

Lihong Wang

One of only 11 recipients of the highly competitive award, Wang was selected from among 600 applicants. The award supports individual scientists of exceptional creativity who propose pioneering — and possibly transforming — approaches to major challenges in biomedical and behavioral research, according to the NIH.

The award will provide Wang with a total budget of $3.8 million over five years.

Wang, the Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, says his research will explore transporting light into the body’s tissues far beyond the classical penetration limits for high-sensitivity imaging and low-side-effect therapy.

“I am honored to have received this award from among such a competitive group,” Wang says. “This award will allow us the intellectual freedom and resources to develop a brand new technology. If successfully implemented, it would impact many disciplines of biomedicine with applications, including imaging, such as functional brain imaging and reporter gene imaging; sensing (oximetry and glucometry); manipulation (optogenetics and nerve stimulation); and therapy (photodynamic therapy and photothermal therapy).”

A leading researcher on new methods of cancer imaging, Wang has received more than 30 research grants as the principal investigator with a cumulative budget of more than $38 million. His research on non-ionizing biophotonic imaging has been supported by the NIH, National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Department of Defense, The Whitaker Foundation and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

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Scientists read monkeys’ inner thoughts

By decoding brain activity, scientists were able to “see” that two monkeys were planning to approach the same reaching task differently — even before they moved a muscle.

Moran/Pearce

In the classic center-out reaching task, a monkey reaches from a central location to targets on a circle surrounding the starting position. This task does not allow the neural encoding for hand position to be separated from the neural encoding for hand velocity. If the starting position varies, however, as in the task shown here, hand position and initial hand velocity can be disambiguated.

Anyone who has looked at the jagged recording of the electrical activity of a single neuron in the brain must have wondered how any useful information could be extracted from such a frazzled signal.

But over the past 30 years, researchers have discovered that clear information can be obtained by decoding the activity of large populations of neurons.

Now, scientists at Washington University in St. Louis, who were decoding brain activity while monkeys reached around an obstacle to touch a target, have come up with two remarkable results.

Their first result was one they had designed their experiment to achieve: they demonstrated that multiple parameters can be embedded in the firing rate of a single neuron and that certain types of parameters are encoded only if they are needed to solve the task at hand.

Their second result, however, was a complete surprise. They discovered that the population vectors could reveal different planning strategies, allowing the scientists, in effect, to read the monkeys’ minds.

By chance, the two monkeys chosen for the study had completely different cognitive styles. One, the scientists said, was a hyperactive type, who kept jumping the gun, and the other was a smooth operator, who waited for the entire setup to be revealed before planning his next move. The difference is clearly visible in their decoded brain activity.

The study was published in the July 19 advance online edition of the journal Science.

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Unraveling the Brain’s Process for Predicting the Future



Associate Professor Jeffrey M. Zacks studies
 the brain’s process for predicting the future. (David Kilper)


Every day we make thousands of tiny predictions — when the bus will arrive, who is knocking on the door, whether the dropped glass will break. Now researchers are unraveling the process by which the brain makes these prognostications.

Predicting the near future is vital in guiding behavior, says Jeffrey M. Zacks, PhD, associate professor of psychology.

“It’s valuable to be able to run away when the lion lunges at you, but it’s ­super valuable to be able to hop out of the way before the lion jumps,” he says.

Zacks and his colleagues believe that a good part of predicting the future is maintaining a mental model of what is happening now. Occasionally this model needs updating, especially when the environment changes unpredictably.

In the study, volunteers watched movies of everyday events such as washing a car or building a LEGO model. When researchers stopped the movie, participants predicted what would happen next.

Sometimes the movie stopped when a new occurrence was about to take place. Other times, the researchers stopped the movie in the middle of an event. They found that participants correctly ­predicted activity within the event more than 90 percent of the time; they correctly predicted across the event boundary less than 80 percent of the time.

Zacks says the experiments offer hope of targeting prediction-based ­updating mechanisms to better diagnose early stage neurological diseases and provide tools to help patients.

Read more about this study in the university’s Newsroom

World’s largest hunk of cancer genome data released

To speed progress against cancer and other diseases, the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital-Washington University Pediatric Cancer Genome Project has announced the largest release to date of comprehensive human cancer genome data for free access by the global scientific community.

The amount of information released more than doubles the volume of high-coverage, whole-genome data currently available from all human genome sources combined. This information is valuable not just to cancer researchers, but also to scientists studying almost any disease.

The release of this data was announced as a part of a perspective published online May 29 in Nature Genetics.

The 520 genome sequences released are matched sets of normal and tumor tissue samples from 260 pediatric cancer patients. The Pediatric Cancer Genome Project is expected to sequence more than 1,200 genomes by year’s end. Each sample is sequenced at a quality control level known as 30-fold coverage, ensuring maximum accuracy. The St. Jude and Washington University researchers are analyzing the genomic sequences to determine the differences between each child’s normal and cancerous cells to pinpoint the causes of more than a half-dozen of the most deadly childhood cancers, an effort which has already produced a number of key discoveries reported in top scientific journals.
 
“This effort has generated more discoveries than we thought possible,” says James Downing, MD, St. Jude scientific director who leads the project at St. Jude. “We want to make this information available to the broader scientific community so that, collectively, we can explore new treatment options for these children. By sharing the information even before we analyze it ourselves, we’re hoping that other researchers can use this rich resource for insights into many other types of diseases in children and adults,” he said.

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Bonni to lead anatomy and neurobiology department

Azad Bonni, MD, PhD, currently professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, will be the next head of the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Bonni becomes the Edison Professor and head of Anatomy and Neurobiology in October 2012. Larry J. Shapiro, MD, executive vice chancellor for medical affairs and dean of the School of Medicine, made the announcement.

“The Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology has a very distinguished history of leadership and innovation in its field,” Shapiro says. “We are confident that Dr. Bonni, who has produced many remarkable insights into brain development, will support and expand those traditions.”

Bonni studies how the brain is built at the level of individual connections between nerve cells. Key areas of his research include studies of the mechanisms that regulate the development of nerve cells and their ability to connect with each other in the brain. His lab is currently focused on the role of transcriptional and ubiquitin signaling in these processes. He also investigates how those mechanisms can contribute to neurological diseases when they go awry.

“The opportunity to lead the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology at Washington University School of Medicine is a great honor,” Bonni says. “Research at Washington University has had a lasting impact in the establishment of neuroscience as a discipline, and the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology has played a central role.”

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Alzheimer's trials

Grant to fund first clinical trials aimed at Alzheimer's prevention

 

The School of Medicine has received nearly $4.2 million from the Alzheimer’s Association to accelerate the launch of the first clinical trials to prevent the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. The award is the largest research grant in the history of the 32-year-old association.

Randall J. Bateman, MD, principal investigator of the grant and director of the Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer’s Network (DIAN) Therapeutic Trials Unit at Washington University, will lead the trials, which will determine if the disease can be halted or delayed before problems in memory and other brain functions become apparent.

The research will be conducted through the DIAN, an international research partnership focused on understanding inherited forms of Alzheimer’s. DIAN is headed by John C. Morris, MD, the Harvey A. and Dorismae Hacker Friedman Professor of Neurology. Bateman and Morris treat patients at Barnes-Jewish Hospital.

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Supporting life sciences

Doctoral students named first Monsanto graduate fellows

Washington University has received a $930,000 grant from the Monsanto Co. to support graduate student research in life sciences. The grant, to be distributed over the next seven years, will establish a Monsanto graduate fellowship program.

Each year, two graduate students pursuing doctoral degrees in the university’s Division of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (DBBS) will be selected as fellows. Life sciences include plant sciences, microbiology, biochemistry, immunology, genetics and other specialties.

Jordan K. Teisher, a doctoral student in evolution, ecology and population biology, and Jeremy D. King, a doctoral student in plant biology, have been named the first Monsanto graduate fellows.

“Through this fellowship program, Monsanto is giving Washington University graduate students a unique opportunity to be exposed to the breadth of research in life sciences,” says Stephen M. Beverley, PhD, the Marvin A. Brennecke Professor of Molecular Microbiology and chair of the executive council of the DBBS.

As fellows, the students will be taught how to run laboratory research programs. They also will have the opportunity to interact with Monsanto scientists to gain experience in a corporate research environment.