Once today’s undergraduates retire, they will likely continue living, on average, to age 102. And if they’re lucky, they may benefit indirectly from the recent HMS Dean’s Symposium on Clinical and Translational Research, held April 30 and May 1 at three locations in Boston and Cambridge.
“Your hair thins, your skin wrinkles, and your brain ages,” pointed out psychologist and neuroscientist Randy Buckner in a morning session at the HMS Martin Conference Center. Of this terrible triad, science has been the least successful at understanding and intervening in the processes that lead to severe memory loss and cognitive disorders.
The symposium aimed to help speed up the translation of scientific advances into the clinic. Three sessions covered the economic and informational structures of collaboration and innovation, the brain, and nanotechnology.
The symposium was sponsored by Harvard Catalyst, a University-wide enterprise based at HMS that helps investigators from disparate disciplines and institutions find each other, form teams, access tools and technologies, and obtain seed funding. A new video by Jesse Dylan laying out the big idea behind Harvard Catalyst premiered at the symposium.
The first tangible outcome of the event is an application by Harvard Catalyst for National Institutes of Health stimulus funding to support Buckner’s work. If funded, Buckner, a Howard Hughes investigator and HMS lecturer on radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital, will have the resources to connect data from three MRI scanners in the greater Boston area and two at other translational research sites nationally. The project is an affordable bid to find the genetic and biological correlates of brain function and dysfunction of thousands of people who normally undergo the brain scans for other reasons.
