News

The next Got Health? talk Headaches: When to Get Help, presented by Ann Ford Fricke, nurse practitioner at the Medical Center, will be held from 12:10 to 12:50 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 18, in the Kate Gleason Auditorium of the Central Library's Bausch and Lomb Building, 115 South Ave. She will discuss headache causes, management, and treatments. The lecture is sponsored by the Center for Community Health. Parking is available in the Court Street garage, which is connected to the library.

What would Stuart Little make of it? Mice have been created whose brains are half-human. As a result, the animals are smarter than their siblings. The idea is not to mimic fiction but to advance understanding of human brain diseases by studying them in whole mouse brains rather than in laboratory dishes.

The altered mice still have mouse neurons - the thinking cells that make up around half of all their brain cells. But practically all their glial cells, the ones that support the neurons, are human.

It’s still a mouse brain, not a human brain, says Steve Goldman of the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York. But all the non-neuronal cells are human.

A new study out today in the Journal of Neuroscience shows that traumatic brain injury can disrupt the function of the brain's waste removal system. When this occurs, toxic proteins may accumulate in the brain, setting the stage for the onset of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

We know that traumatic brain injury early in life is a risk factor for the early development of dementia in the decades that follow, said Maiken Nedergaard, M.D., D.M.Sc., co-director of the University of Rochester Center for Translational Neuromedicine and senior author of the article. This study shows that these injuries set into motion a cascading series of events that impair the brain's ability to clear waste, allowing proteins like tau to spread throughout the brain and eventually reach toxic levels.

The findings are the latest in a series of new insights that are fundamentally changing the way scientists understand neurological disorders. These discoveries are possible due to a study published in 2012 in which Nedergaard and her colleagues described a previously unknown system of waste removal that is unique to the brain which researchers have dubbed the glymphatic system.

Joana Osorio, MD

Department of Neurology Instructor, Joana Osorio, MD has been chosen by the Child Neurology Foundation as the 2014 Shields Research Grant Recipient for her project, Cell-based therapy for Pelizaeus-Merzbacher disease.

This research project aims to develop a cell-based treatment strategy for Pelizaeus-Merzbacher disease (PMD), a severe pediatric disorder of myelin caused by mutations in the proteolipid protein gene (PLP1). By transplanting genetically corrected cells from affected patients in a murine model of PMD, we will test their ability to rescue the phenotype and produce normal myelin. We will use induced pluripotent stem cells from patients with duplications and missense mutations in the PLP1 gene, correct the mutations by using gene-editing techniques and subsequently differentiate those to oligodendroglial fate. After intracerebral transplantation in a murine model of PMD, we will evaluate their motor performance and posteriorly the histology of engrafted cells. If this study is successful, this study will provide a proof of principle that autologous cell transplantation can be a feasible strategy for treatment of congenital disorders of myelin.