2022 Neuroscience Retreat Focuses on Collaboration as Key to New Discoveries

Multidisciplinary collaboration is essential for life-changing neuroscience discoveries, innovative technologies, clinical therapies, and preventive disease strategies, according to participants at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine’s 2022 Neuroscience Retreat.

W. Dalton Dietrich III, Ph.D., moderated the daylong October conference at the Lois Pope LIFE Center, which covered the gamut of neuroscience research and a wide range of challenging problems, from spinal cord and traumatic brain injuries to neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy Body Dementia, as well as preventive and protective strategies for brain health.

There are more than 170 neuroscience projects underway in various departments, centers, and institutes throughout the Miller School. A major goal of the retreat was to discuss potential for a future dedicated, integrated neuroscience center, and the importance of team science partnerships.

“We have an abundance of outstanding scientists in this field, and we achieve our best by working together,” said Henri Ford, M.D., M.H.A., Dean and Chief Academic Officer, welcoming researchers from dozens of Miller School programs, centers, and institutes to the retreat. “We need to foster interactions that will exponentially increase productivity and yield seminal discoveries that will be translated into clinical interventions to help humanity. We want to be a beacon of hope, and this is the next step in turning that dream into reality.”

In the “Brain Health, Aging, and Degenerative Diseases” presentation, David Loewenstein, Ph.D., Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and Aging (CNSA), focused on the work of the CNSA and ongoing team science with numerous UM departments and centers. “We have developed cognitive stress tests that can detect pre-clinical Alzheimer’s disease that are being commercialized and are now used all over the world,” said Dr. Loewenstein. “The tests are designed to challenge the cognitive system and have proven to be able to identify subtle memory deficits among pre-symptomatic individuals with biomarker confirmation that are not detected by traditional cognitive measures.”

Research at the CNSA is meaningful and robust. Across all the Center’s funded studies, scientists actively follow more than 1,000 older adults longitudinally; more than 70% are from underserved populations including Hispanic/Latino/Black/ African American cultural groups. A major current focus is on underserved and underrepresented minority older adults.

Dr. Loewenstein also acknowledged the collaborative work being done by 1Florida Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at UM, a major statewide consortium that is one of 31 centers in the U.S. that are funded by the National Institutes of Health. “It is team science that will guide us,” he said.

The CNSA is committed to four central missions: l Change the current understanding of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and related dementias (ADRD) from being incurable, inevitable, and largely untreatable to a new reality in which these diseases are curable, preventable, and treatable; l Continued development of novel cognitive stress paradigms for the early assessment of cognitive change in pre-clinical AD; l Be a leader in the University of Miami’s efforts to become a national hub and international destination center for

AD and ADRD; and l Address the important issue of research and access to underserved and underrepresented minority older adults in AD and ADRD research.

Dr. David Loewenstein, fourth from right