Warren symposium follows legacy of geneticist giant

If we want to understand how the brain creates memories, and how genetic disorders distort the brain’s machinery, then the fragile X gene is an ideal place to start. That’s why the Stephen T. Warren Memorial Symposium, taking place November 28-29 at Emory, will be a significant event for those interested in neuroscience and genetics. Stephen T. Warren, 1953-2021 Warren, the founding chair of Emory’s Department of Human Genetics, led an international team that discovered Read more

Mutations in V-ATPase proton pump implicated in epilepsy syndrome

Why and how disrupting V-ATPase function leads to epilepsy, researchers are just starting to figure Read more

Tracing the start of COVID-19 in GA

At a time when COVID-19 appears to be receding in much of Georgia, it’s worth revisiting the start of the pandemic in early 2020. Emory virologist Anne Piantadosi and colleagues have a paper in Viral Evolution on the earliest SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences detected in Georgia. Analyzing relationships between those virus sequences and samples from other states and countries can give us an idea about where the first COVID-19 infections in Georgia came from. We can draw Read more
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BRAIN initiative

NINDS director: neuroscience now largest ‘bucket of money’

On Friday, NINDS director Walter Koroshetz made an interesting remark in a lecture to Emory’s Department of Neurology. He said that in the 2016 National Institues of Health budget, neuroscience is now the largest “bucket of money,” especially with the recent boost in funding for Alzheimer’s research. That’s larger than the bucket for cancer. To be sure, biomedical research in general got a boost from Congress, with the NIH receiving its largest increase in a decade, and cancer is still a big deal!

Koroshetz explained that neuroscience research is spread out among NINDS (National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke), NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health), NIDA (National Institute for Drug Abuse) and several others, while cancer research is concentrated at the National Cancer Institute. [Here’s some official category tracking that the NIH does – his breakdown checks out.]

Koroshetz highlighted a project from Dieter Jaeger and Garret Stanley that is part of the White House’s BRAIN Initiative focused on mapping brain circuits and connectivity. He also noted NINDS’s efforts in promoting translational research, since pharmaceutical companies were frustrated by repeated failures in the 1990s with difficult areas such as stroke, and the R35 mechanism for funding “outstanding investigators” for up to eight years continuously.

Posted on January 12, 2016 by Quinn Eastman in Neuro 2 Comments