Using New Technologies to Understand the Brain
Nicole Calakos, MD, PhD, is the Lincoln Financial Group Distinguished Professor of Neurobiology. She specializes in synaptic physiology research and Parkinson’s disease and other movement disorders. She said the proximity and collegiality of so many talented researchers and physicians at Duke creates a fertile field for research. “It’s one thing to make a technical advance,” she said, “but when you have the opportunity to work alongside colleagues in other disciplines who can harness that to solve biological and health problems — that’s where the magic happens.”
Neuroscience research today is transformed by big data. We used to examine one piece of a complex biological system at a time: one protein, one gene, or one neuron. Now we’re able to look expansively at nearly all the components at the same time.
If you combine this with artificial intelligence, you’re going to be seeing a lot of impact at many levels, from systems neuroscience — which is the study of how the brain processes information to see, hear, smell, move, and learn — to basic cellular neuroscience discovery of how genes and proteins interact to make brain cells work.
Another major direction that’s transformative is cell modeling using induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). We’re able to differentiate stem cells into brain-related cells to create organs-on-a-chip to model brains and neurons. With iPSCs and cell modeling, I’m hopeful we’ll see advances in regenerative neural tissue therapies to help people recover from brain and spinal cord damage.
Big data coupled with AI modeling has great potential to accelerate predicting which interventions are more likely to succeed in clinical trials. Already, you can model proteins and identify drugs that might bind to them.
We’re also seeing that with current computational power and densely recorded data from the brain, we can generate outputs that create neural prostheses for speech, vision, and hearing. We have key proofs of principle, and we’re going to see incredible growth here with AI advances.
What Comes Next:
- Medical Education: Training Students to be Change Agents
- Vaccines: Fine-tuning Immune Response
- Geriatric Medicine: Caring for the Aging Brain
- Health Equity: Addressing Disparities in Pallative Care
- Cancer Research and Care: Personalized and More Effective Therapies
- Epidemiology and Population Health: Reaching Beyond Our Walls
- Integrative Immunobiology: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Human Immune System
- Genomics and Precision Health: Using Genetic Tools to Prevent Disease
Story originally published in DukeMed Alumni News, Fall 2024.
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