Flexible electrode arrays that carry auditory information to the brainstem of patients with nerve damage, helping them to hear again. Gene therapy in the inner ear that partially restores hearing in animal models of inherited deafness. Automated EEG analysis that determines states of consciousness and can recognize incipient seizures.
Researchers and clinicians throughout the Harvard Medical School community joined colleagues from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, at the third Bertarelli Symposium to hear about these and other current efforts in translational neuroscience and engineering, including initial findings from the first six research grants awarded through the Bertarelli Program in Translational Neuroscience and Neuroengineering in 2011.
The symposium, entitled “Neuroengineering: Molecules, Minds and Machines,” held Jan. 17 and 18, coincided with the signing of a $6 million gift from the Fondation Bertarelli to the Bertarelli Program, a partnership between HMS and EPFL.
From multi-photon imaging microendoscopes that can diagnose hearing loss in the cochlea to robotic and molecular methods that can help restore function after paralysis due to spinal cord injury, the symposium highlighted the kind of collaborative, pioneering advances the program’s creators intended to stimulate.
“In following these projects over the past two years, I have been incredibly impressed with the way investigators from very different disciplines have united to solve clinical problems in imaginative ways,” said HMS Dean Jeffrey S. Flier, addressing the crowd at the school’s Armenise Amphitheater. “They are using the best basic science from their respective fields to accomplish what none could have done on their own.”
Launched in 2010 with an initial $9 million gift, the Bertarelli Program established partnerships between scientists, engineers, clinicians and students at HMS and EPFL—one of the premier European schools of engineering and science—to accelerate the translation of basic biomedical developments into improved health for people with neurological disorders.
“In designing the Bertarelli Program, we needed to decide what neuroengineering really means,” said David Corey, HMS director of the program. “It combines engineering, neurology and neuroscience, yet it becomes more than the sum of its parts by focusing on new solutions for neurological and psychiatric disorders and seeking neuroscience knowledge that will be useful for patient care immediately rather than down the road. In just two years, it is clear the program is delivering on that vision.”
“The strength of this program is in what it achieves as a whole—facilitating and encouraging scientists and medics from wholly different disciplines, backgrounds and, of course, locations to work together,” said Ernesto Bertarelli, co-president of the Fondation Bertarelli along with his sister, Dona Bertarelli. “I look, for example, at the work being done on paralysis and hearing problems and am heartened and excited by the fact that we have different research programs, from the two universities, working together, combining specialties and all with a common goal. It is how science should be, I believe.”
During the two-day symposium, speakers described a variety of approaches for improving diagnostic technologies for neurological disorders, understanding and treating genetic disorders, advancing regenerative medicine through cell and gene therapy, and exploring brain-machine interfaces for sensory and motor systems.
Keynote speaker Bernardo Sabatini, Takeda Professor of Neurobiology at HMS, described some of his lab’s work, which investigates the relation between brain structure and function in neuroscience with unprecedented detail. If more precisely measuring brain structures leads to greater understanding of their function, he said, then being able to observe phenomena at the individual synapse and even nanoscale levels will bring researchers one step closer to “capturing the basic design principles” of the brain. This, in turn, may help scientists devise better tools for diagnosis and treatment.
The new gift from the Bertarelli Foundation, to be distributed through 2017 to HMS and EPFL, promises to continue to inspire neuroengineering advances by bringing basic and clinical investigators together with experts in device design for sensory and other neurologic systems. It also will create new and broader opportunities for innovation.
Another $3 million will establish the Bertarelli Catalyst Fund for the Dean of Harvard Medical School, with the goal of supporting HMS priorities at the discretion of the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine.
“We are delighted at the generosity of the Bertarelli Foundation,” said Flier. “This type of forward-thinking support is exactly what’s needed to help us continue to unravel the profound complexities of the human brain.”
The symposium was funded by the Bertarelli Foundation.
