MBB JUNIOR SYMPOSIUM 2024:
NEW WAYS TO STUDY THE BRAIN

Please note: This event is not open to the public.

The MBB junior symposium features talks by and discussions with a variety of scholars on an interdisciplinary theme in mind/brain/behavior. The symposium will include speaker presentations and a panel discussion with speakers and symposium organizers. Participation is required of students pursuing the Certificate in MBB (students in honors MBB tracks) and is also open and recommended to students pursuing or considering a secondary field in MBB.


SYMPOSIUM THEME

Based on the medical and ethical concerns that limit direct study of human brains, most neurobiologists interested in human brains and their ills limited their studies to model organisms hoping to uncover principles that could be applied to humans. Human studies often involved clinical or psychological examinations and relied on indirect technologies placed outside the skull. We are now in a revolutionary time when technological advances permit profound insights into healthy brains and brain disorders. This year’s Mind Brain Behavior (MBB) spring symposium will provide a glimpse into several of these new approaches. Paola Arlotta (Professor and Chair, Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology) will discuss brain organoids, three dimensional structures that can self-assemble, generate diverse neural cell types, recapitulate important features of human brain development, and live for years. They are grown from stem cells donated by people with and without brain disorders, providing insight into disease mechanisms. Steve McCarroll (Professor of Genetics, Harvard Medical School) will describe modern approaches to genetics and neurobiology that have revealed many genes associated with brain disorders and what those genes do. Finally, Leigh Hochberg (Professor of Engineering, Brown University, Director of the Center for Neurotechnology and Neurorecovery, Massachusetts General Hospital) will speak about new ways to record from human brains directly from volunteers undergoing neurosurgical procedures. Together, these talks, and the discussion that follows, will provide an introduction to what is an exciting and productive frontier of neuroscience.


PRE-REGISTRATION

All MBB undergraduates are welcome to attend. If you are a junior or senior participating to complete the symposium requirement, please register at
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1yZHEM3y4J8IXz2LrGAK132b7ytIqFnEzH5qwwWlNEag by noon on Thursday, February 1st.
 

SCHEDULE

3 p.m. - Welcome and Introduction, Steven Hyman

3:10 p.m. – Human brain chimeroids as avatars to study human disease and development, Paola Arlotta
 

3:40 p.m. – Intracortical neural prostheses for the restoration of communication and mobility, Leigh Hochberg

4:10 p.m. – Human genetics and human brain biology: Insights from natural variation, Steven McCarroll

4:40 p.m. – Panel Discussion, moderated by Joshua Sanes

TALKS AND SPEAKERS

Human brain chimeroids as avatars to study human disease and development
Paola Arlotta (Golub Family Professor and Chair of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard, https://hscrb.harvard.edu/people/paola-arlotta)
Inter-individual genetic variation affects the susceptibility to and progression of many diseases. Efforts to study the molecular mechanisms mediating the impact of human genetic variation on normal development and disease phenotypes are limited, however, by the paucity of faithful cellular human models, and the difficulty of scaling current systems to represent multiple individuals. Here, we present human brain “Chimeroids”, a highly reproducible, multi-donor human brain cortical organoid model generated by the co-development of cells from a panel of individual donors in a single organoid, while maintaining fidelity to endogenous tissue. We leveraged Chimeroids to investigate inter-individual variation in susceptibility to neurotoxic stressors that exhibit high clinical phenotypic variability. Individual donors varied in both the penetrance of the effect on target cell types, and the molecular phenotype within each affected cell type. Our results show that human genetic background may be an important mediator of neurotoxin susceptibility and introduce Chimeroids as a scalable system for high-throughput investigation of the contribution of human genetic variation to brain development and disease.

Intracortical neural prostheses for the restoration of communication and mobility
Leigh Hochberg (Senior Lecturer on Neurology, Medical School / L. Herbert Ballou University Professor of Engineering and Professor of Brain Science, Brown University, https://researchers.mgh.harvard.edu/profile/1245802/Leigh-Hochberg)
For people with paralysis, intracortical brain-computer interfaces (iBCIs) can record ensembles of individual neurons, decode their activity in real-time, and restore communication and limb movement. Dr. Hochberg will review progress in the BrainGate clinical trials, and the potential for restorative neurotechnologies to improve the function and health of people with a wide range of neurologic or mental health disorders.

Human genetics and human brain biology: Insights from natural variation
Steven McCarroll (Dorothy and Milton Flier Professor of Biomedical Science and Genetics, Medical School, https://mccarrolllab.org/people)
In natural settings – in which individuals have diverse genetic inheritances, environments and life histories, as humans do – almost all aspects of biology exhibit quantitative variation across individuals. Natural variation makes it possible to observe a biological system such as the human brain across many contexts and to learn underlying principles. Together with new technologies for high-volume data collection and computational approaches from machine learning, it is increasingly possible to recognize biologically important patterns in high-volume data sets that teach us new principles about how the underlying biological system works and how it is shaped by genetic variation. I will describe ways that studies of natural variation in human brain tissue – in human brain cells and the genes they express – are leading to surprising insights about schizophrenia, Huntington’s disease, natural brain aging, and normal brain function.


ORGANIZERS

Steven Hyman (Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor and Harald McPike Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, https://hsci.harvard.edu/people/steven-hyman-md)

Joshua Sanes (Jeff C. Tarr Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology, https://www.mcb.harvard.edu/directory/joshua-sanes)