Wellcome News 56 editorial
When a bee works out the best route to take as it flies between flowers with just 1 million neurons, it is solving problems that a supercomputer could take a week to answer. And yet such delights are tempered by brain images from people with Alzheimer’s disease - seeing the destruction wreaked in the brain by this neurodegenerative disease brings home the devastating impact it has on the lives of those afflicted and on their relatives, friends and society at large.
At the Wellcome Trust, we are fortunate to be able to fund so many talented neuroscience researchers in the UK and internationally. We fund research that includes molecular and cellular neuroscience,cognitive, neuropsychological and imaging studies, and clinical studies investigating neurological and psychiatric conditions. And, as a browse through the news section of our website shows, this research is bringing many new insights.
In the last few months, for example, we have seen studies of the chemicals that send messages between nerve cells showing that acetylcholine is vital for our brain cells to pay attention to a demanding task, and that serotonin plays a critical role in regulating emotions such as aggression during social decision making. Meanwhile, new retinal ganglion cells have been discovered that control our levels of sleepiness according to the brightness of our surroundings.
Other researchers are using scanners to identify the parts of the brain that become activated when we perform particular tasks. Such approaches have shown that the ventral striatum encourages us to be adventurous - it becomes activated when we choose unfamiliar options - and that the brain regions responsible for stopping habitual behaviour are underactive in people with obsessive-compulsive disorder and their unaffected close relatives.
The challenge for neuroscience - as in all areas of biomedical science - is to find ways of taking basic research forward to help people. Some areas have seen considerable success: for example, a modern look at psychology has been developed by a cadre of talented researchers into highly successful cognitive behavourial therapies for mental illnesses such as bulimia nervosa, post-traumatic stress disorder and panic disorder.
But in other areas there is still much to do, particularly for dementia and neurodegenerative diseases. Indeed, as reported on page 10 of this issue, previous estimates of levels of dementia in developing countries may have substantially underestimated the problem - the 10/66 Dementia Research Group has found that the prevalence of dementia in urban settings in Latin America is comparable with rates in Europe and the USA.
As part of our commitment to invest in this area, in October 2007 we awarded £1.3 million funding to a collaboration of leading UK experts to investigate the genetics underlying late-onset Alzheimer’s disease. The team is scanning the entire human genome in search of the genes that predispose people to or protect them from developing the disease.
Now, in a joint activity with the Medical Research Council, we have launched a new scheme of Strategic Awards in Neurodegenerative Diseases. Such diseases take several different forms, and include Alzheimer’s disease, frontal temporal dementia, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and multiple sclerosis. We hope that this £30m scheme will help to bring greater understanding of the biological processes underlying these diseases, and will catalyse the development of early diagnostic approaches and new, effective therapies.
Mark Walport
Director of the Wellcome Trust