The University of Utah’s top-rated physicians and researchers are at the forefront of neuroscience: pioneering treatments in health care, breaking ground in imaging techniques, and designing new solutions for brain and spinal cord repair. The Neurosciences Gateway is a portal to discovering the U of U’s areas of neuroscience expertise, distributed among 17 departments and 15 centers and institutes.
Launched in Fall, 2014, the Neuroscience Initiative unites the academic, translational, and clinical neuroscience communities toward the common goals of better understanding the brain in disease and in health. Learn more.
University of Utah researchers have received $1.4 million to further develop an implantable neural interface that will allow an amputee to move an advanced prosthetic hand with just his or her thoughts. The neural interface will also convey feelings of touch and movement.
Called the Utah Slanted Electrode Array, the neural interface uses 100 electrodes that connect with nerves in an amputee’s arm to read signals from the brain telling the hand how to move. Likewise, the neural interface delivers meaningful sensations of touch and movement from a prosthetic hand back to the brain. READ MORE
Listen to an interview about the research on The Scope Radio.
New Insights Into Causes of ALS
University of Utah neurologists Summer Gibson, M.D., and Stefan Pulst, M.D., are authors on a collaborative, multi-institutional study published in the journal Science. The research identifies mutations in a gene, TBK1, as contributing to ALS. Taken together with previous findings, the discovery highlights defects in biological pathways – autophagy and inflammation - as potential key players in development of the disease.
"This is particularly important because TBK1 is involved in the same natural immunity and autophagy pathways as two other previously identified ALS genes, optineurin (OPTN) and p62 (SQSTM1/sequestosome)," says Gibson. Autophagy in particular may be important for destruction of prion-like structures that accumulate in the brains of some patients. The findings suggest a novel course of therapeutic interventions for treating the disease.