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NIH AWARDS UT-HOUSTON MEDICAL SCHOOL $5 MILLION TO SIMULATE BRAIN FUNCTION
HOUSTON - (September 15, 1999) - A $5 million, 5-year program project grant has been awarded to the UT-Houston Medical School Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Strokes.
The grant will fund a facility with sophisticated computer capabilities that will enable researchers to understand how brain processes are related to one another. The facility will help researchers confirm and construct data related to the brain with one goal in mind - to understand and simulate brain function.
"Computer simulation is not a new concept, but it is an important tool whose time has come in brain research," says John H. Byrne, Ph.D., chairman of the department and principal investigator of the study. "Thanks to an outstanding team of researchers assembled at the UT-Houston Medical School and Health Science Center, funding agencies are in agreement that UT-Houston will be at the forefront in the emerging field of computational biology."
The computer will help confirm what researchers have learned about the brain while informing and guiding targeted research for the future on questions they have yet to consider.
"Our team is unique in that we are experimentalists who are not just feeding data into the computer -- we are the scientists who also directly develop the data and that makes a difference," adds Byrne.
Project leaders are Drs. Paul Smolen, Terry Crow, Douglas Baxter and David Marshak.
Computational modeling of the brain involves conducting experiments, converting findings into mathematical formulas, and feeding those formulas into the computer. Just as the computers have simulated flight based on data and complex relationships between man and plane, computers in this study will generate a model of the brain and its complex inter-relationships based on mathematical data. The computer, with guidance from researchers, will utilize those relationships to connect the dots and model a bigger picture of the brain and its complex function.
"This is a formidable task considering that the brain has billions of neurons and scientists have been working for decades to get a handle on how small circuits of 1,000 neurons or less work," says Byrne.
The program project grant consists of four projects. The projects will examine multiple levels of the brain's organization including: 1) the properties and interactions of gene networks and neural circuits; 2) how neurons are affected by the learning process; 3) how neurons generate motor activity; and 4) the circuitry of the retina and the brain.
"This grant represents an endorsement by our peers for the work we are doing," says Byrne. "It will allow us to further develop the field of computational modeling by developing approaches to analyze and simulate brain function which is an important step toward understanding the complex interactions and patterns of activity within the human brain."
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