The National Institutes of Health retires the majority of its chimpanzees

Last week the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced that it was retiring most of its 360 chimpanzees that have been available for research. According to an article published in the July 5, 2013 issue of Science, only 50 chimpanzees will be supported, and those animals will be used mainly for behavioral or genomic research as opposed to invasive procedures.

A new rule proposed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on June 11 may also change the status of captive chimpanzees from "threatened" to "endangered," thereby affecting privately funded research on chimpanzees.

Congratulations to our Workstudy graduates!

Congratulations to our five graduating Workstudy students! We hope your futures will be bright!

From left to right: Fernando Lopez, Michael Dickerson, Ada Chan, Miguel Guzman, and Erin Reyes

Mood Rhythm Team Wins Heritage Open mHealth Challenge

 

Pictured (from left to right): Fred Wells, Mark Matthews, Deborah Estrin, Mark Wagar, Stephen Voida, Saeed Abdullah, Ellen Frank, Tanzeem Choudhury

Washington, D.C. – The winner of the Heritage Open mHealth Challenge was announced today at Health DataPalooza IV. Co-sponsored by Heritage Provider Network, Open mHealth, and the University of California, Los Angeles, the challenge was created to catalyze the development of mobile applications using an open architecture to help them communicate with one another and function on multiple devices. The winning team and recipient of the $100,000 prize created Mood Rhythm, a mobile application (which runs on iOS and Android) developed to help patients with bipolar disorder better monitor and analyze their daily rhythms and stay in balance.

Launched in January of this year, the Heritage Open mHealth Challenge encouraged the use of the Open mHealth architecture to overcome limitations that typically arise when dissimilar mobile health applications cannot communicate with one another. Applications conforming to the open architecture increase the diversity and utility of personalized health information available to improve chronic disease management, both through better patient self-monitoring and better clinical decision-making.

Teams were required to submit a demo of their application, along with video footage of the app in action. To ensure that applications would be developed with the end user in mind, each team entering the challenge had to include at least one member with clinical expertise and at least one participating user serving as a patient or a patient surrogate. Teams were also encouraged to include development, design, and data analysis experts.

“The Challenge was a great opportunity to encourage the development of shared platforms and the integration of different tools. These are critical steps if we’re going to realize the potential of mobile health technologies to improve health. Among several promising applications, Mood Rhythm stood out because of its elegant approach to collecting data in a way that can truly improve [the] ability of patients and their doctors to make better decisions about treating bipolar disorder,” said Dr. Brian Quinn, team director of the Pioneer Portfolio and one of the Challenge judges.

Mood Rhythm takes advantage of smartphones to track a patient’s daily routine and provides feedback to help patients maintain a regular daily rhythm while incorporating this information into clinical decision making. The application also uses sensors in the phone to track sleep and social activity patterns, providing more information for both patients and clinicians. The team is contributing a routine, sleep, and sensing module to Open mHealth.

“Rhythms guide our lives,” said Dr. Tanzeem Choudhury, team leader and Professor of Information Science at Cornell University. “Our biological clocks tell us when we need to sleep, eat and wake.  When these rhythms are interrupted or obstructed, it can be difficult for our bodies to get what they need to stay healthy and balanced.”

When asked what the impact of Mood Rhythm might have on the community, Choudhury said, “It is one of the greatest challenges in healthcare to develop cutting edge technology that not only meets clinical needs but that can be incorporated with ease into patients’ lives. The combination of automatic sensing and self-tracking aims to provide long-term low-maintenance support for people with bipolar disorder.  The clinicians and patients who have used MoodRhythm to date have found it to be an enormously valuable tool for monitoring social rhythms and mood and for seeing the relationship between the two. We feel this is due in large part to a balanced collaboration with patients and clinicians acting as co-designers. The ongoing and close involvement of this community will be essential—having their voices steering the future development of MoodRhythm.”

Along with Mood Rhythm, four Challenge finalists were selected. ACEScreening provides hearing screening technology for smartphones and other devices. IMPACT strives to improve physical function, pain, and mobility in older obese adults with hip and/or knee arthritis. Psychologist in a Pocket supports the treatment of psychological disorders. Spiro Sano is an infrastructure for managing multiple respiratory disease states, such as asthma and COPD and for supporting beneficial behavioral changes such as smoking cessation and physical activity.

Common features of submitted projects included the ability to record information in real time instead of having to rely on memory at the end of the day, control over when and how much information is provided to the doctor, and using sensing tools such as global position systems and accelerometers to track social activity and other behaviors.

The judging panel for the challenge included Deborah Estrin, Computer Science Professor and Co-Founder of Open mHealth; Dr. Richard Merkin, CEO and Founder of the Heritage Provider Network; Dr. David Feinberg, President of the UCLA Health System; former U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra; Dr. Mark Smith, President and CEO of California HealthCare Foundation; Anne Wojcicki, Co-Founder of 23andMe; Dr. Mark McClellan, former administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration; Karen Ignagni, President and CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans; and Brian Quinn, Team Director of Pioneer Portfolio.

About HPN:
Heritage Provider Network, Inc. (HPN) is on the cutting edge of the accountable care model of healthcare delivery: coordinated, patient-doctor centric, integrated health care systems that represent the future of health care in the United States. HPN is dedicated to quality, affordable health care and putting patients' wellness first. The collaborative mobile aps prize is one of a number of competitions HPN is sponsoring in its ongoing efforts to spur innovations in healthcare, including the $3million Heritage Health Prize Competition, and the Institute of Medicine’s Go Viral for Health Prize. HPN is also in the process of launching a number of other health related prizes.  (www.heritageprovidernetwork.com) 

Media Contact HPN: DC Media Group LA, Inc
Janet Janjigian, janet@dcmediagroupla.com

About Open mHealth:
Open mHealth is non-profit startup building open software architecture to break down the barriers in mobile health to integration among mHealth solutions and unlock the potential for mHealth. Through a shared set of open APIs, both open and proprietary software modules, applications and data can be ‘mixed and matched’, and more meaningful insights derived through reusable data processing and visualization modules. Enhanced integration at both module and application levels allows products to be more nimbly adapted and customized to maximize potential impact. Through an open community, we are working together to build more effective mhealth solutions, drive innovation in healthcare evaluation, and transform healthcare for all. Open mHealth is funded in part by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. (http://openmhealth.org/)

Media Contact Open mHealth: Anna de Paula Hanika, anna@openmhealth.org

About UCLA:
UCLA is California's largest university, with an enrollment of more than 40,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The UCLA College of Letters and Science and the university's 11 professional schools feature renowned faculty and offer 337 degree programs and majors. UCLA is a national and international leader in the breadth and quality of its academic, research, health care, cultural, continuing education and athletic programs. Six alumni and six faculty have been awarded the Nobel Prize. (http://www.ucla.edu/)

Media Contact UCLA: Davin Malasarn, dmalasarn@cnsi.ucla.edu

Art|Sci Exhibition :: "Duality" by James K. Gimzewski

"Duality" is an Art|Sci manifestation of complexity emerging from a tiny network of billions of tiny self-assembled, self-organized, non-linear connections that materialize in time and space through holistic processes and which are a kinesthetic visualization of wandering in and out of the fuzzy borders of chaos and order. We use real networks, where the creator has given permission to its expanding and collapsing spatio-temporal morphogenic and often catastrophic dynamics.

This project represents the transition in science and art from giving up on the clock to embrace a cloud in terms of Karl Popper’s important statement, "We live in a universe not of clocks but of clouds". In the laboatory, we build electro-ionic clouds. In the gallery, we let them self-create images, songs, and dance for this Art|Sci exhibit entitled "Duality".

It is the duality of the dark space between the known and unknown, determinism and surprise, mathematical form and fuzziness from which the atoms, electrons, and ions speak to the visitors without censorship.

James K. Gimzewski is a Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA. His accomplishments include the first STM-manipulation of molecules at room temperature, the realization of molecular abacus using bucky balls, the discovery of single molecule rotors and the development of nanomechanical sensors based on nanotechnology, which explore the ultimate limits of sensitivity and measurement. His current interests within CNSI are in the nanoarchitectonics of molecular systems and molecular and biomolecular machines, in particular those with quantum mechanical possibilities for information processing.

In Collaboration With: Henry Sillin, Audrius Avizienis & Huanqi "Franky" Zhu



Photos by: Blanka Buic for the Art|Sci Center + Lab at UCLA

Exhibition Date: April 4, 2013

UCLA Researchers Collaborate in BRAIN Initiative

On April 2, 2013, President Obama announced the launch of the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies project or BRAIN and his intent to help “get this project off the ground” by proposing significant investment on this project by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the budget he will send to Congress next week. The new initiative will focus on developing and improving new technologies to better understand the human brain at both a basic level and at an applied level. The project builds on an early proposal published in Science and co-authored by UCLA’s Paul Weiss, Director of the California NanoSystems Institute, Fred Kavli Chair in NanoSystems Sciences, and a distinguished professor in the departments of chemistry and biochemistry and materials science and engineering, in which the program was called the Brain Activity Map (BAM) project.

"Top nanoscientists and neuroscientists have come together to see how the substantial investment and advances in nanoscience and nanotechnology can be used to measure the dynamic chemical and voltage signals in neural circuits." Weiss says. "This project will enable us to develop and to test new models to understand processes such as learning and memory. We may also be able to shed light on what causes neurological disorders when brains malfunction."

The brain is made up of an estimated 85 billion neurons connected at 100 trillion junctures called synapses that dynamically transmit signals in response to external or internal stimulation. Neurons communicate using both electrical signals, such as the movement of ions to create voltage gradients across cell membranes, and chemical signals, such as the release of neurotransmitters like serotonin that diffuse across synapses between neurons. Moreover, sets of neurons work together in networks or neural circuits to carry out different brain processes and to provide signaling feedback.

Understanding how these signals interact will likely depend on understanding neurons, not at the individual level, but at the circuit level. These circuits can involve as many as millions of individual neurons, making them extremely challenging to study.

This challenge is where the BRAIN Project comes in.

An interdisciplinary group of nanoscience and neuroscience researchers from around the country including Weiss; Anne Andrews, the Richard Metzner Endowed Chair in Clinical Neuropharmacology, a Professor in the departments of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences and chemistry and biochemistry and member of CNSI and the Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior; and Sotiris Masmanidis, Assistant Professor in the department of neurobiology and CNSI member, have been designing methods to create maps of brain activity that measure and probe the chemical and electrical signals involved in brain circuits.

"This work is what I came to UCLA to do,” says Masmanidis, an expert in the development of microscale neural probes, “to develop nanoscale tools to probe the network-level dynamics of the brain at small scales and high speeds. In order to do this, we have to make many simultaneous measurements beyond what is currently possible."

Unlike other attempts to map the static architectures of the brain—the framework of neurons and their connections—this effort will build on previous knowledge to focus on the dynamic signals that navigate through that framework. In an interview by io9, George Church, a professor in the department of genetics and the Wyss Institute at Harvard Medical School and co-author of the Science perspective, compared the difference to studying the distribution of a city’s telephone wires versus studying “where, when, and how those wires are transmitting messages.”

"The brain is a dynamic organ, a transducer between the body and the environment, and as such it is constantly changing. To measure and to understand the dynamics of the brain at a critical scale—looking simultaneously at the chemical, physical and neurophysiological interaction among many thousands of neurons—is a technically formidable challenge, for any perturbing analysis itself brings further dynamic change. But we are beginning to assemble the tools that can make such investigation possible and ultimately lead to better understanding of disease and its treatment," says Peter Whybrow, Director of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, Judson Braun Distinguished Professor and Executive Chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, and Physician-in-Chief of the Stewart and Lynda Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital at UCLA. "[BRAIN] is the compelling project for the science of our time."

The project aims to provide valuable information that explains how actions, thoughts, and emotions are controlled by the brain and seeks to shed light on disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, depression, and schizophrenia. Chemical and voltage activity maps could also enable scientists to develop new therapeutic drugs for such disorders.

"Understanding the interacting, dynamic chemistry of the brain is the key to understanding, and eventually treating, diseases such as anxiety and depression," says Andrews. "My group teamed up with nanoscientist Paul Weiss a decade ago in order to see how we might develop new tools to reach the smaller and faster time scales at which the action happens."

The timeliness of the initiative is based on the availability and coalescence of new technology that will have a critical impact on the field. As the name of the initiative implies, technology development will be a major driving force behind the research.

An article describing the current and possible future technologies for the project and how they will enable this endeavor was recently published in ACS Nano by over two dozen co-authors including Andrews, Masmanidis, Church, and Weiss, who is also the journal’s Editor-in-Chief.

"The idea is to accelerate, by decades, the development and application of technology to study the brain by bringing to bear the advances generated by the major U.S. and international investments in nanotechnology over the last decade," Weiss says.

Current technology is capable of measuring either the electrical activity of a small number of neurons at high resolution or of imaging the whole brain at relatively low-resolution, but tools capable of working between those two extremes—focused on neural circuits—are still in the early stages of development.

As described above, tiny probes are being designed that are capable of recording electrical signals over three-dimensional space within the brain. Novel optical tools are being combined with computational approaches to improve the precision of neural imaging while also increasing the numbers of neurons that can be visualized simultaneously. Wireless electronic circuits can be introduced into neuronal networks to measure activity and to affect signaling without requiring invasive surgery.

Additionally, the work of Weiss and Andrews has been focused on uncovering the relationships between neurotransmitters and their receptors, chemical interactions that have required the development of novel strategies that take advantage of cutting edge chemical patterning technology, which enables the researchers to precisely position receptors in a way that is optimized to identify their binding partners.

Experiments will depend on the ability to work at micrometer and nanometer scales that will enable the study of individual neural circuits, synapses between neurons, and neurotransmitter receptors.

Comparisons between the BRAIN project and the Human Genome Project have been drawn. The Human Genome Project, formally begun in 1990 and coordinated by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), energized researchers and catalyzed discussion leading to new areas of investigation. The main goals of the project were to identify all of the genes in human DNA and to determine the sequences of the 3 billion chemical base pairs that make up human DNA. Approximately $300 million per year was provided for the effort.

Likewise, BRAIN offers a new opportunity for collaboration among the NIH, the NSF, and DARPA, with room for participation from industry and foundations. If all goes well, the return from the BRAIN project will rival the return—estimated by some to be $140 for every $1 spent—coming from the Human Genome Project. The project will also create additional jobs for individuals trained in multiple fields and provide educational enrichment, both from a scientific standpoint and from a technology training standpoint. Ethical implications of the research will also be required, according to the White House.

"We have a chance to improve the lives of, not just millions, but billions of people on this planet through the research that’s done in this BRAIN initiative alone,” Obama said in his announcement. “But it’s going to require a serious effort, a sustained effort, and it’s going to require us as a country to embody and embrace that spirit of discovery that is what made America America."

Reprinted from the CNSI website.

Presentation Day for the Entrepreneurship for Science, Medicine, and Technology class

The Entrepreneurship for Science, Medicine, and Technology class comes to an end today with five student groups presenting their business ideas to colleagues and some distinguished guests.

The new class was offered with support from the Price Center for Entrepreneurial Studies in the UCLA Anderson School of Management and CNSI. For the last eight weeks, enthusiastic participants have learned about what it means to be an entrepreneur, including such topics as opportunity recognition, incorporation, calculating the total available market, risk, legal considerations, fundraising, and other topics. Almost all of the classes lasted longer than expected as questions about different scenarios were thrown to Professor George Abe, who has been doing a remarkable job of introducing a new world to our clinicians, scientists, and engineers. The students' hard work culminates with group presentations describing business plans based on their own technology.

We're expecting a good show!

Also, today in history, the Higgs boson shares the stage with Pope Francis on the front page of CNN:

Ome Sweet Ome

In 1990, the Human Genome Project was launched, seeking to identifying the more than 20,000 genes in human DNA. But that was just the beginning of the new era of the "omes" in science.

Modern mass spectrometers are able to identify all of the proteins in a given sample of cells. This approach has been termed the "proteome."

And the analysis of all of a cell's metabolites has been fittingly termed the "metabolome."

The "-ome" suffix in modern molecular biology science means "all constituents considered collectively," and it has become more and more popular as new technology has enabled the pursuit of BIG science.

Whereas molecular biological thesis projects used to be completed after the identification of a single gene, now the identification of tens of thousands of genes may only make up a single thesis chapter. Genomic studies can lead to transcriptomic studies (the identification of all transcribed genes) to proteomic studies, and so on. Researchers have moved beyond technical proficiency at the bench to also be able to understand the basics of computational biology and the field of bioinformatics.

In some recent published articles proposing the creation of brain activity maps as part of an initiative supported by the White House Office of Science and Technology, researchers focused on the brain will attempt to create "connectomes" the identification of all the neural connections in a given brain circuit.

Other "omes" are likely being collected in laboratories all around the world.