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Badri Roysam, director of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Houston, is leading a $ 3.19 million project to create a new technology that could provide unprecedented insights into the injured brain. The technology is a marriage, as Roysam calls it, of a new generation of "super microscopes" providing detailed multispectral images of brain tissue and the UH supercomputer of the HPE Data Science Institute, which interprets the data.
"By allowing us to see the effects of injury, treatments and the processes of healing the body at once, the combination offers unprecedented potential to accelerate research and development of next-generation treatments for brain pathologies," he said. said Roysam, principal investigator with John Redell, badistant professor at UTHealth McGovern Medical School. Funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), the project also includes Dragan Maric, researcher at NINDS, and professors Hien Van Nguyen and Saurabh Prasad of the UH.
The team tackles the seemingly familiar commotion that affects around 42 million people worldwide. This mild traumatic brain injury, usually caused by a lump, a blow or a jolt to the head, disrupts the normal functioning of the brain, triggering a series of cascading molecular and cellular alterations that can lead to neurological, cognitive and behavioral changes. . Concussions have long confused scientists who face technological limitations that prevent a more complete understanding of the pathological changes caused by a concussion, which prevents the design of effective treatment regimens. Until now.
"We can now get our eyes wide open while before we only had a very incomplete view with insufficient details," Roysam said. "The combinations of proteins that we can now see are very informative, for each cell they tell us what type of brain cell it is and what is happening with that cell."
The impact is immediate
Brain injury causes immediate changes in all brain cells, cutting off certain connections and potentially causing blood to leak into the brain – where blood is never thought to be – by crossing the blood-brain barrier. After a concussion, brain tissue becomes a complex "battlefield," said Roysam, with a combination of injury-induced changes, secondary changes due to drug treatments, side effects, and natural body processes. Unraveling these processes will allow the team to develop new "badtails" of drugs consisting of two or more drugs.
"We will present a carefully validated and widely applicable toolbox with unprecedented potential to accelerate research and develop next-generation treatments for brain pathologies," said Roysam.
Once validated, the new technology can also be applied to stroke, brain cancer and other degenerative brain diseases.
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