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McGovern Institute Researcher Receives Prestigious McKnight Technological Innovations in Neuroscience Award; Alan Jasanoff to develop cellular-level functional MRI with calcium imaging agents

Business Wire, August 16, 2006

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- The McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience awarded Alan Jasanoff, Associate Member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, one of four Technological Innovations in Neuroscience Awards for 2006-2008. The awards provide $200,000 over two years for research projects that seek to develop new tools and techniques for neuroscience research so that scientists can learn more about how the brain works.

Jasanoff is developing contrast agents (the MRI equivalent of dyes) that detect changing levels of calcium in cells as a direct measure of what neurons are doing while the brain works. "This award recognizes the importance of finding ways to combine the specificity of classical neural recording methods with the noninvasiveness of functional imaging," Jasanoff said. "The new capabilities we are developing will help neuroscientists study and understand how coordinated mechanisms of neural information processing across the brain govern behavior."

The most widely used forms of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) of brain activity have limited spatial and temporal resolution because they rely on image contrast produced by changes in blood that only indirectly reflect neural activity. Jasanoff will explore an entirely different method, developed in his lab, based on iron oxide nanoparticles that produce image contrast when they aggregate. The particles have been surface modified with proteins that will induce particle aggregation in response to elevated intracellular calcium ion levels that accompany synaptic activation and action potential firing. If successful, the new method will be a more direct measure of neural activity, with the potential for improved spatial and temporal resolution in fMRI.

"New tools and techniques open new avenues of research," said David Tank, Ph.D., Henry Hillman professor of molecular biology and physics at Princeton University and chair of the awards committee. "This year's awards support cutting-edge proposals for four different novel approaches to measuring and perturbing the activity of neurons within the living brain. If these projects succeed, they will provide important new methods to study both the normal and diseased nervous system."

The Technological Innovations in Neuroscience Awards are in their seventh year. The awards support scientists working on new and unusual approaches to understanding brain function to expand the range of technologies available to the neurosciences. The awards do not support research based primarily on existing techniques.

About the McGovern Institute at MIT

The McGovern Institute at MIT is a neuroscience research institute committed to improving human welfare and advancing communications. Led by a team of world-renowned, multi-disciplinary neuroscientists, The McGovern Institute was established in February 2000 by Lore Harp McGovern and Patrick J. McGovern to meet one of the great challenges of modern science - the development of a deep understanding of thought and emotion in terms of their realization in the human brain. Additional information is available at: http://web.mit.edu/mcgovern/.>