Business & the brain

From healing brain injury in children with a diabetes drug to diagnosing Alzheimer’s with an eye exam, five major research projects announced Monday by Brain Canada are focused on “translational” medicine, aimed less at the pure mysteries of the mind and more at helping patients recover from specific diseases. “If you start with basic research, you’re 20 years away from having an impact,” said Alexandra Stewart, executive director of the W. Garfield Weston Foundation, a key donor. “As business people, we sort of feel we want to get things going,” said Galen Weston, son of the late Garfield and executive chairman of George Weston Limited, which controls flagship retail chains such as Loblaws, Holt Renfrew and Selfridges, and is also Canada’s largest baker. A big donation can be a catalyst, he said, “because we have this capability of putting in some more money to help it along.” Rupert Duchesne, chair of the board of Brain Canada, said $22.5-million has been raised. With $7.5-million — of which 40% comes from each of the W. Garfield Weston Foundation and the federal government, and the remainder from donors including the Krembil Foundation — Brain Canada on Monday announced the following projects.

EYE TEST FOR DEMENTIA

Doctors are diagnosing Alzheimer’s and frontotemporal dementia “far too late,” said Anthony Lang, whose team is led by Sandra Black of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto. “When a patient with Alzheimer’s disease presents with memory problems, or a patient with Parkinson’s disease presents with a little tremor, we used to think of that as the earliest manifestations of the disease. We now recognize that the disease is well established and far on its way to progressing to severe disability,” he said. Most treatments have failed because they are applied too late, “so our study is designed to try to define the presence of disease at the earliest stages.” This involves studying abnormalities in the retina or lens to see how they closely they are linked to brain dysfunction. “The hope is that we will have cost-effective, easily applied, non-invasive tools” to diagnose and treat these brain diseases at the earliest stages, he said. “Right now, we believe we’re closing the barn door far too late.”

STEM CELLS IN THE BRAIN

“Your brain is not hard wired for eternity, but quite remarkably, everyone sitting in this room has stem cells in their brain and those stem cells continue to make the nerve cells that allow your connectivity and your wiring to be changed in subtle ways that affect how you think and feel,” said Freda Miller of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. “We discovered a pathway that regulates those stem cells when the brain develops and stumbled, serendipitously, upon the finding that a highly safe, commonly used human drug can recruit that pathway and control the stem cells in the brains of mice.” The drug is metformin, a diabetes treatment, and is to be used on the brains of children after brain cancer radiation treatment.

NEURON POLARITY

The closest of the projects to fundamental research, this will examine the “polarity” of brain cells, which guides neurons to grow into the right shape, on the hunch that a loss of polarity is the mechanism underlying some brain disorders. “To fix the brain, we better understand how it was built,” said Michel Cayouette of the Institut de Recherches Cliniques de Montréal. “You need to know how each of the parts are machined, and how they are assembled together, and how they contact each other, and what is the role of each and every single part.”

SKIN CELLS IN THE EYE

The farthest removed, physiologically, from the brain, this project is largely about the eye and restoring vision in those who have lost photoreceptor neurons, which typically do not grow back. The team, led by Valerie Wallace of the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, aims to “convert a patient’s own skin cells into functional photoreceptors that can be used for therapeutic purposes,” and thereby restore sight to the blind, specifically with cone cells that sense colour.

EPIGENETICS AND MENTAL HEALTH

Led by Michael Meaney of the McGill University, this team will look at how environmental factors, such as parental influence, alter the function of genes. This could lead, they hope, to the discovery of potential biomarkers for mental illness, which could aid prevention.

FOTOLIA