Insights to come from new brain research base

With the cloning of monkeys as an important foundation to build upon, an innovation park for research into brain intelligence and brain disease has been established in Shanghai.

The G60 Brain Intelligence Innovation Park, with a budget of 10 billion yuan ($1.5 billion), will be dedicated to becoming a world-class research center of brain disease models in nonhuman primates to serve medical diagnosis and treatment and a national-level development and transformation center of achievements in technologies regarding brain-inspired intelligence, Pu Muming, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and director of the Institute of Neuroscience of the CAS, said on Wednesday at the park’s inauguration ceremony.

The CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, a part of the Institute of Neuroscience, established the center jointly with the district government of Songjiang, where the center is based.

“Research in these two areas echoes the main goals of the China Brain Project and will contribute to the city realizing its goal of becoming a global hub of science and technology innovation,” Pu said.

The monkeys, cloned by using somatic cell nuclear transfer, the same procedure used to create the world’s first two cloned monkeys in China last year, will play a crucial role in the research, scientists said.

“The significance of monkeys cloned this way is that it enables them to become effective model animals as they will have identical genetic backgrounds, which reduces interference brought by individual differences to drugs and lab tests and greatly reduces the number of experimental animals used,” Pu said, adding that about 100,000 monkeys are used worldwide for tests each year.

“Current tests usually produce inaccurate results, as each monkey most likely has a different genetic background,” said Sun Qiang, director of the nonhuman primate research facility at the institute.

Xu Lin, a researcher at the Kunming Institute of Zoology under CAS, said some brain diseases only affect primates.

“And therefore, the research of such diseases and the relevant new drugs based on cloned monkeys rather than lab mice will be of great significance,” he said.

When cloned monkeys are used as model animals, it will also help in brain-inspired intelligence research, as scientists can have a complete understanding of the brain structure and nerve connections of the whole brain of monkeys, which are similar to humans, to pave the way for breakthroughs in designing AI calculating methods and devices using brain-inspired intelligence, Pu said.