February 26, 2003
DFCI scientists, Harvard brain researchers find common ground in
search for cures
Except for the enormous human toll of both, cancer and brain diseases such as Alzheimer's might seem to have little in common.
R. Segal, MD, PhD
Yet at least 11 Dana-Farber scientists have joined a novel, generously funded Harvard Medical School center aimed at discovering new treatments for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, ALS, and multiple sclerosis.
Why? Because cancer and these devastating brain diseases represent a basic similar life process gone awry - but at opposite extremes. Nerve degeneration stems from an abnormal excess of "programmed" cell death. In cancer, by contrast, a failure of normal cell death allows cells to escape their growth controls and multiply endlessly into tumors.
"What the neurodegeneration scientists are doing is the flip side of what we're doing with cancer," says Rosalind Segal, PhD, of Pediatric Oncology at DFCI. (Her Harvard appointment is in neurobiology.) So, in searching for drugs that can halt cell death in brain and nerve diseases, scientists might find clues to restoring controls on maverick cancer cells.
D. Gabuzda, MD
The DFCI-based researchers, mostly neurobiologists and immunologists, have been lured by this intellectual bridge as well as by access to state-of-the-art facilities and top collaborators sprinkled around the Longwood Medical Area and Cambridge. The new corps of investigators and technicians and the upgraded labs in the shared facilities have blossomed with the aid of an anonymous $37.5 million gift to Harvard Medical School in 2001 to launch the Harvard Center for Neurodegeneration and Repair (HCNR) and keep it running for five years.
The HCNR is a center without walls, uniting several hundred neuroscience investigators based at the medical school and six Harvard-affiliated hospitals. The lab facilities and collaborating groups are divided into five biomedical and biotechnology "cores," whose members are striving to translate expanding knowledge of the brain into new treatments for currently incurable neurodegenerative diseases.
Dana Gabuzda, MD, who studies how the AIDS virus ravages the brain by infecting specialized immune cells there, represents Dana-Farber on the center's governance committee. Institute researchers who have signed up with the collaboration, she says, are interested in such issues as the difference between brain cells' normal development and brain cancer, or potential ways to regenerate brain cells damaged by chemotherapy. "It's also relevant for cancer researchers at Dana-Farber to discover how to deliver chemotherapy to brain tumors more effectively," she says.
In addition to Gabuzda and Segal, Dana-Farber members of the HCNR to date are: Harvey Cantor, MD; Yoojin Choi; Jonathan Duke-Cohan, PhD; Joshua LaBaer, MD, PhD; Massimo Loda, MD; Melissa Nicholson, PhD; David Rowitch, MD, PhD; Charles Stiles, PhD; and Kai Wucherpfennig, MD, PhD.
The five "cores" that anchor the consortium have been formed since the HCNR was established in 2001. They are:
- The Center for Translational Neurology Research is designed to support training of pre- and post-doctoral students, provide research grants, and establish a Harvard-wide clinical trials service.
- The Center for Brain Imaging provides high-tech instruments for studying brain function and dysfunction in animal models. (Some of these instruments aren't widely available.)
- The Center for Molecular Pathology offers microarrays, or "gene chips," and other powerful tools for comparing differences in genetic activity between normal and diseased brain cells.
- The Laboratory for Drug Discovery in Neurodegeneration, or "Robolab," contains cutting-edge equipment for quickly sorting through drugs or compounds that affect a certain biological target in cells. It is a powerful way of identifying potential therapies for treating neurodegenerative diseases.
- The Center for Bioinformatics Research is a major effort to make Harvard a leader in this growing field required to store and analyze a mountain of data.
