Nobel Prize for medicine goes to discoverers of brain’s 'inner GPS'

[Buster's Uncle]

Nobel Prize for medicine goes to discoverers of brain’s 'inner GPS'
Reuters
By Mia Shanley and Kate Kelland  STOCKHOLM/LONDON  Mon Oct 6, 2014 3:30pm BST



Professor Ole Kiehn presents the winners of the Nobel Prize in Medicine U.S.-British scientist John O'Keefe and Norwegian husband and wife Edvard Moser and May-Britt Moser for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain, at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm October 6, 2014.  Credit: Reuters/Bertil Ericson/TT News Agency



(Reuters) - British-American John O'Keefe and Norwegians May-Britt and Edvard Moser won the 2014 Nobel Prize for medicine for discovering the brain's navigation system and giving clues as to how strokes and Alzheimer's disrupt it.

The Nobel Assembly, which awarded the prize of 8 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million) at Sweden's Karolinska Institute on Monday, said the discovery solved a problem that had occupied philosophers and scientists for centuries:

"How does the brain create a map of the space surrounding us and how can we navigate our way through a complex environment?"

Ole Kiehn, a Nobel committee member and professor in Karolinska's neuroscience department, said the three scientists had found "an inner GPS that makes it possible to know where we are and find our way".

O'Keefe, now director at the centre in neural circuits and behaviour at University College London (UCL), discovered the first element of the positioning system in 1971 when he found that a type of nerve cell in a brain region called the hippocampus was always activated when a rat was in a certain place in a room.

Seeing that other nerve cells were activated when the rat was in other positions, O´Keefe concluded that these "place cells" formed a map of the room.

Uta Frith, a UCL professor of cognitive development said O'Keefe had shown "it is possible to literally map the mind".

"He has done much more than discovering neuronal mechanisms in the brain: he has discovered cognitive mechanisms that explain how human beings and other animals navigate," she said. "This beautiful work is heralding a new age of exploration of brain and mind."

In 1996, Edvard Moser and May-Britt Moser, who are married and now based in scientific institutes in the Norwegian town of Trondheim, worked with O'Keefe to learn how to record the activity of cells in the hippocampus.

Nearly a decade later, the Moser team discovered cells, in the entorhinal cortex region in brains of rats, which function as a navigation system. These so-called "grid cells", they discovered, are constantly working to create a map of the outside world and are responsible for animals' knowing where they are, where they have been, and where they are going.

Bill Harris, head of physiology, development and neuroscience at Britain's University of Cambridge, said the scientists' work "has not only revolutionised our understanding of this amazing puzzle (the brain), but has also opened the door into problems of place memory and how we learn and remember routes of navigation, and what sleep and dreams may be doing for memory and performance."


"STATE OF SHOCK"

While the findings help explain how the brain works, they have no immediate implications for new medicines or other therapies, since they do not set out a mechanism of action.

But knowledge about the brain's positioning system can also help understanding of what causes loss of spatial awareness in stroke patients or those with devastating brain diseases like dementia, of which Alzheimer's is the most common form and which affects 44 million people worldwide.

O'Keefe told reporters in London he was very surprised to get the Nobel Prize, particularly after what he described as a "chequered youth" jumping from studying classics at school, then aeronautics at college before getting into philosophy and psychology.

"I'm still in a state of shock," he said.

May-Britt Moser danced and drank champagne with her colleagues in Trondheim after she was told of the award.

"This is so great, this is crazy. I am just jumping, screaming," Moser told Reuters. "I am so proud of all the support that we have had. People have believed in us, in what we have been doing and now this is the reward."

Norwegian TV showed her co-workers singing "Happy Nobel to you" to the tune of "Happy Birthday".

Her husband did not immediately learn that he had won the Nobel Prize as he was on a plane bound to Munich. Someone was waiting for him at Munich airport with flowers and gave him the news, he told the Norwegian news agency NTB.

The Mosers join a small club of married couples to win a Nobel Prize that includes Pierre Curie and Marie Curie.

John Stein, an emeritus professor of physiology at Oxford said that, as with so many Nobel Prize winners, the scientists' discovery was at first ridiculed and dismissed, only later to get the recognition it warrants

"This is great news and well deserved," Stein said. "I remember how great was the scoffing in the early 1970s when John first described 'place cells'. 'Bound to be an artefact' and 'he clearly underestimates rats' sense of smell' were typical reactions. Now, like so many ideas that were at first highly controversial, people say: 'Well that's obvious'!"

Medicine is the first of the Nobel Prizes awarded each year. Prizes for achievements in science, literature and peace were

first awarded in 1901 in accordance with the will of dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel.

(Additional reporting by Ben Hirschler in London, Simon Johnson and Niklas Pollardin Stockholm, and Gwladys Fouche in Oslo. Editing by Alistair Scrutton and Angus MacSwan)


http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/10/06/uk-nobel-medicine-idUKKCN0HV0Q920141006

[Buster's Uncle]

Nobel discovery opens window onto Alzheimer's disease
Reuters
By Ben Hirschler  14 minutes ago



Professor John O'Keefe poses in his laboratory at University College London (UCL), in London October 6, 2014. REUTERS/Suzanne Plunkett



LONDON (Reuters) - The discovery of cells in the brain that act as the body's internal global positioning system, which won three scientists the Nobel Prize for medicine on Monday, opens an intriguing new a window onto dementia.

Since these spatial cells are among the first to be hit in Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia -- explaining why sufferers often lose their way -- understanding how they are degraded should shed important light on the disease process.

That is the belief of British-American researcher John O'Keefe, winner of the 2014 prize alongside Norwegians May-Britt and Edvard Moser, who plans to take his research to the next level as director of a new brain institute in London.

"We're now setting up to do much more high-tech studies where we hope to follow the progression of disease over time," he told reporters after hearing he would share the 8 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million) prize.

"This will give us the first handle as to when and where the disease starts and how we can attack it at a the molecular and cellular level."

The battle against Alzheimer's has been long and frustrating. Global cases of dementia are expected to treble by 2050, yet scientists are still struggling to understand its basic biology and drug development is littered with failures.

The work by O'Keefe and the Mosers will not lead to immediate breakthroughs but by explaining how cells function -- and then fail to function -- in two very specific regions of the brain it is seen as vital for unpicking how Alzheimer's develops.

Dementia, of which Alzheimer's is the most common form, already affects 44 million people worldwide and that number is set to reach 135 million by 2050, according to Alzheimer's Disease International, a non-profit campaign group.

"Understanding how the healthy brain functions, especially areas of the brain crucial to learning and memory, is incredibly important in understanding what changes occur during conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease," said Doug Brown, director of research and development at Britain's Alzheimer's Society.

The Nobel Prize winners' work on the brain's navigation system stretches back more than 40 years, but more recently scientists have developed powerful new tools for studying brain circuits that O'Keefe plans to put to work at the new London research institute where his is director.

The first of more than 150 scientists will start work at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour at University College London next year, using state-of-the-art lasers, molecular biology and computational modeling to explore the brain's intricate wiring.

"It's a very exciting time," O'Keefe said.

The Group of Eight leading industrial countries set a goal last December of finding a cure or effective treatment for dementia by 2025.

It is a decade since the last drug was approved to treat Alzheimer's, and there is still no treatment that can slow the progression of the disease, with current drugs only easing some of the symptoms of the disorder.

"We all know there is a time bomb there," O'Keefe said. "We are starting to get a handle on it but that doesn't mean it is going to turn into a cure in the immediate future."

(Reporting by Ben Hirschler, Editing by Angus MacSwan)


http://news.yahoo.com/nobel-discovery-opens-window-onto-alzheimers-disease-170000216.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Nobel Prize Winners in Physiology or Medicine Discovered ‘Inner GPS’
Award Given for Discoveries Relating to Brain Cell Positioning Systems
The Wall Street Journal
By Gautam Naik  Updated Oct. 6, 2014 1:50 p.m. ET



A British-American and two Norwegian scientists were awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering brain circuits that form an “inner GPS” system that helps us to navigate our environment.

Half of the prize was awarded to American-born John O’Keefe for identifying nerve cells that enable the creation of a spatial map that determines our sense of “place.” The other half of the prize was shared by a Norwegian couple, May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser, who identified a separate set of nerve cells involved in navigation.

Dr. O’Keefe, a dual U.K.-U.S. citizen, is director of the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre in Neural Circuits and Behavior at University College London. Dr. May-Britt Moser is the director of the Centre for Neural Computation in Trondheim, Norway. Dr. Edvard Moser is the director of the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience in Trondheim.

A sense of place and navigational ability are both central to our existence. Most memories are linked to a physical place, meaning that much information we remember and use in daily life has a spatial context to it.

“It’s quite fundamental to how we are as people,” said Loren Frank, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco.

But how are these properties—our sense of place and ability to navigate—represented in our brain?

In 1971, Dr. O’Keefe found a key part of the answer. He was studying an area of the brain called the hippocampus, which past research had suggested was important in memory formation because damage to it often led to profound amnesia in patients.

By connecting electrodes to the brains of rats as they moved freely in a room, Dr. O’Keefe discovered that certain nerve cells got activated when the rat was in a particular spot. Crucially, the cells weren’t just registering the location, but also appeared to be making circuits constituting an inner map of the place.

If the rat was put in another part of the room, another set of nerve cells got activated. When the animal was returned to the original location, the original cells were reactivated. The upshot: The memory of a place was stored as a specific combination of these nerve or “place” cells.

“The great surprise was that [hippocampus] was a spatial system,” recalled Dr. O’Keefe, at a briefing on Monday in London.

At the time, many researchers scoffed. “They thought it was far too simple,” said John Stein, emeritus professor of physiology at the University of Oxford. Some suggested that the animal must be finding its way around “because it would leave a smell and that the cells that were activated were ‘smell’ cells.”



From left, Edvard Moser, John O’Keefe and May-Britt Moser react to winning the Nobel Prize for medicine. European Pressphoto Agency (2); Getty Images (middle)


But through a set of carefully controlled experiments Dr. O’Keefe provided evidence that cells worked not by triggering the sense of smell but by giving rise to a map of the room.

His work helped inspire the Mosers’ research. In 2005, while conducting similar experiments on rats, the husband-and-wife team found that nerve cells in a nearby part of the brain called the entorhinal cortex got activated when the animals passed certain places. Together, these cells lay out a grid-like pattern across the environment that enables a rat to navigate spatially.

“Before the discovery of ‘place cells’ we didn’t have any sense of how the brain built maps and computed this information on a cellular level,” said Juleen Zierath, professor of clinical integrative physiology at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute and chairman of the Nobel Committee. The later discovery of the grid-like cells, she said, “really gives us a navigational chart to operate on as well.”

The findings could shed light on certain diseases. For example, patients with Alzheimer’s disease often lose their way and can’t recognize where they are. Knowledge of how the brain’s global-positioning system works could help reveal how spatial memory loss occurs.

Regarded as the most prestigious prize for medical and physiological research, the eight million Swedish kronor ($1.1 million) Nobel award is given to recipients whose discoveries greatly enhance the understanding of life or the practice of medicine. The decision is made by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute—a group of 50 professors whose 18-member working body evaluates nominations from scientists around the world and proposes top candidates.

— Anna Molin and Christina Zander contributed to this article.


http://online.wsj.com/articles/winners-announced-for-nobel-prize-in-physiology-or-medicine-1412590423?ru=yahoo?mod=yahoo_itp