NeURoscience | Vol 13 | 2022

NEUROSCIENCE University of Rochester | Ernest J. Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience Vol. 13 - 2022

Diverse minds and determined hearts make change:

Forging equitability in Neuroscience PG 4

F R O M T H E D I R EC TO R ’ S D E S K

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t is remarkable how time moves.

The future always seems distant, yet here we are in the final weeks of the academic year. Spring is upon us.

John J. Foxe, Ph.D. Kilian J. and Caroline F. Schmitt Chair in Neuroscience

Director, Ernest J. Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience

Professor & Chair, Department of Neuroscience

In April, we welcomed our newest Neuroscience faculty member – Dr. Nathan A. Smith, M.S. (’10), Ph.D. (’13), who has made an academic homecoming. He was the first Black graduate of the Neuroscience Graduate Program and one of the founding members of the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience Diversity Commission. Along with his new faculty appointment, Dr. Smith is also the associate dean for Equity and Inclusion at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. Dr. Smith found it vital to return to be a part of this movement and make meaningful changes in equitability and diversity in science. To say we are thrilled to have him back is a gross understatement.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion at the Del Monte Institute are core priorities. I believe this issue is an incredibly important one and it shares what we are doing to change who has access to the bench. It is only with action that real change is possible.

There is a strength in our differences – when we learn from one another we grow, and with growth comes more critical thoughts, better questions, and stronger science.

Our student spotlight features one of the newest members of the Neuroscience Diversity Commission, Victoria Popov.

As a student who is deaf, she gives us

On the cover From left: Adrienne Morgan, Ph.D., Nathan A. Smith, Ph.D., and Manuel Gomez-Ramirez, Ph.D. (sitting).

Photo: John Schlia Photography

Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience Executive Committee John Foxe, Ph.D., Chair, Department of Neuroscience Bradford Berk M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Medicine, Cardiology Robert Dirksen, Ph.D., Chair, Department of Pharmacology & Physiology Diane Dalecki, Ph.D., Chair, Department of Biomedical Engineering Jennifer Harvey, M.D., Chair, Department of Imaging Sciences Robert Holloway, M.D., M.P.H., Chair, Department of Neurology

tremendous insight into how to be inclusive in our work and day-to-day interaction with others. As a valuable member of my lab, Tori’s research aims to understand the underlying neurophysiological processes that contribute to cognitive and social functions in individuals with neurocognitive disorders.

Our faculty continues to make fascinating discoveries. Dr. Samuel Norman-Haignere, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of Neuroscience and Biostatistics & Computational Biology and one of our newest faculty members. You’ll meet Dr. Norman-Haignere in this issue and read about the research he was recently involved in that discovered an area of the brain that only responds to singing and made a splash in the scientific community.

In June, we are looking forward to coming together for the first time in more than two years for our symposium. The Institute is partnering with the University of Rochester Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center to host the event titled: Developmental Emergence of Neural Circuit Architecture and Function. It will feature speakers from more than a dozen institutions and organizations.

In Science,

John J. Foxe, Ph.D.

Paige Lawrence, Ph.D., Chair, Department of Environmental Medicine Hochang (Ben) Lee, M.D., Chair, Department of Psychiatry Shawn Newlands, M.D., Ph.D., M.B.A., Chair, Department of Otolaryngology Webster Pilcher, M.D., Ph.D., Chair, Department of Neurosurgery University of California, Berkeley Steven Silverstein, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Psychiatry Duje Tadin, Ph.D., Chair, Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences

UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER | ERNEST J. DEL MONTE INSTITUTE FOR NEUROSCIENCE

NEUROSCIENCE Editor/Writer Kelsie Smith Hayduk Kelsie_Smith-Hayduk@ urmc.rochester.edu Contributors Mark Michaud Emily Boynton Feature Photography John Schlia Photography Designer Beth Carr

NEWS BRIEFS

Researchers provide insight into how the brain multitasks while walking New research turns the old idiom about not being able to walk and chew gum on its head. In a paper published in NeuroImage, scientists have shown that the healthy brain is able to multitask while walking without sacrificing how either activity is accomplished.

During these experiments, Edward Freedman, Ph.D., an associate professor of Neuroscience who led the study, used a Mobile Brain/Body Imaging system, or MoBI, located in the Frederick J. and Marion A. Schindler Cognitive Neurophysiology Lab. The platform combines virtual reality, EEG, and motion capture technology. While participants walk on a treadmill or manipulate objects on a table, 16 high speed cameras record the position markers placed on the person's body with millimeter precision, while simultaneously

measuring their brain activity. Researchers found that walking patterns of participants improved when they performed a cognitive task at the same time. This suggests stability improved while walking and performing another task, compared to when the participants solely focused on walking.

“Looking at these findings to understand how a young healthy brain is able to switch tasks will give us better insight into what’s going awry in a brain with a neurodegenerative disease like Alzheimer’s disease,” said Freedman.

MoBI avatar with human traces.

(Courtesy Freedman)

A key to restoring sight may be held in a drug that treats alcoholism Researchers may have found a way to revive some vision loss caused by age-related macular degeneration – the leading cause of blindness – and the inherited disease retinitis pigmentosa (RP), a rare genetic disorder that causes the breakdown and loss of cells in the retina. The drug disulfiram – marketed under the brand name Antabuse – used to treat alcoholism, may hold the key to restoring this vision loss.

The research published in Science Advances involved mice and found disulfiram helped restore some vision by suppressing the sensory noise in the inner retina caused by dying photoreceptors in the outer retina. This is brought on by the progression of outer retinal degeneration (such as age-related macular degeneration or RP), in which the light-sensing cells called “photoreceptors” slowly die over years. In past research, as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, Michael Telias, Ph.D., assistant professor of Ophthalmology, Neuroscience, and Center for Visual Science at the University of Rochester Medical Center, and first author on the paper, found that as photoreceptors die off it disrupts the function of the inner retina. This causes the sensory noise that ultimately becomes a barrier between the surviving photoreceptors and the brain. This latest research, led by Richard Kramer, Ph.D., professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Michael Goard, Ph.D., assistant professor at University of California, Santa Barbara, found that disulfiram can target that sensory noise, allowing the surviving photoreceptors in the outer retina to complete the signal to the brain and ultimately restore some vision.

Image right: A mouse retinal ganglion cell (green), which becomes hyperactive in degenerative vision disorders. Other retinal cell types are labeled in blue. Hyperactivity interferes with the proper transfer of signals from the retina to the brain. Richard Kramer's lab at UC Berkeley has discovered what causes hyperactivity and has identified drugs that interfere with the process, and by doing so, improve vision.

(Image credit: Shubhash Yadav, Kramer lab) NEUROSCIENCE | VOL 13, 2022

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NEWS BRIEFS

Researchers find new clues in the brain linking pain and food It has long been known that there is an association between food and pain, as people with chronic pain often struggle with their weight. Researchers at the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience may have found an explanation in a new study that suggests that circuitry in the brain responsible for motivation and pleasure is impacted when someone experiences pain. In the study published in PLOS ONE, researchers looked at the brain’s response to sugar and fat. They found that none of the patients experienced eating behavior changes with sugar, but they did with fat.

Patients with acute lower back pain who later recovered were found to most likely to lose pleasure in eating pudding

and show disrupted satiety signals – the communication from the digestive system to the brain – while those with acute lower back pain whose pain persisted at one year did not initially have the same change in their eating behavior.

But chronic lower back pain patients did report that eventually foods high in fat and carbohydrates, like ice cream and cookies, became problematic for them over time and brain scans showed disrupted satiety signals.

“It is important to note, this change in food liking did not change their caloric intake,” said Paul Geha, M.D., assistant professor of Psychiatry, Neurology, and Neuroscience, who lead this study and first authored a previous study published in PAIN that recent research is building on. “These findings suggest obesity in patients with chronic pain may not be caused by lack of movement but maybe they change how they eat.”

Researcher develops new methods to understand how the brain responds to sounds – including singing New research has identified neurons in the brain that ‘light up’ to the sound of singing, but do not respond to any other type of music. Assistant Professor of Neuroscience and Biostatistics and Computational Biology Samuel NormanHaignere, Ph.D., with the Del Monte Institute is first author on the paper in Current Biology that details these findings. “The work provides evidence for relatively fine-grained segregation of function within the auditory cortex, in a way that aligns with an intuitive distinction within music,” Norman-Haignere said.

The singing-specific area of the brain is located in the temporal lobe, near regions that are selective for speech and music. Researchers worked with epilepsy patients who had electrodes implanted in their brain (electrocorticography or

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ECOG) in order to localize seizure-related activity as a part of their clinical care. ECOG enables more precise measurements of electrical activity in the brain.

In previous research, fMRI was used to scan the brains of participants as they listened to different types of speech and music. Norman-Haignere combined the fMRI data from this prior study in order to map the locations of song-selective neural populations, which were identified in their new ECOG study. *Nancy Kanwisher, Ph.D., and Josh McDermott, Ph.D., of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research and Center for Brains, Minds and Machine are co-senior authors of the study.

UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER | ERNEST J. DEL MONTE INSTITUTE FOR NEUROSCIENCE

F A C U LT Y P R O F I L E

Samuel Norman-Haignere, Ph.D.

Q&A with Samuel Norman-Haignere, Ph.D. Samuel Norman-Haignere, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of Neuroscience, and Biostatistics and Computational Biology.

He received his B.A. in Cognitive Science from Yale University and completed his Ph.D. in Neuroscience at MIT. His research aims to understand how the brain represents natural sounds like speech and music.

Please tell us about your research.

My research is motivated by the fact that hearing is really challenging. We take for granted being able to understand one another during a conversation or recognize a familiar piece of music or melody. I'm broadly interested in understanding how the brain understands and codes natural sounds like speech and music. These sounds appear to be uniquely important to humans, and we have evidence that the human brain has mechanisms for encoding these sounds that are distinct from those present in other animals.

I have two main types of data modalities that I work with; I use MRI research and intracranial recordings. For the latter, I work with neurologists and neurosurgeons at the Medical Center to measure neural responses from epilepsy

patients who have electrodes implanted in their brain (electrocorticography or ECOG) to localize seizure-related activity as a part of their clinical care. ECOG enables more precise measurements of electrical activity in the brain and is the only time we can measure responses with high spatiotemporal precision in the human brain.

Another central goal of my research is to develop computational methods and models that allow us to understand how the brain codes natural sounds using these neural recordings. We develop statistical methods to reveal underlying structure from high-dimensional neural responses to natural sounds, and we develop computational models that can predict those responses and link them with perception and behavior.

How did you become interested in this field?

I first became interested in perception. Perception feels simple and effortless, but when you start to “look under the hood” and try to understand the underlying mechanisms you realize that what the brain is doing is incredibly impressive.

The kinds of things we do every day – understand speech, recognize a familiar melody, etc. – are highly challenging to replicate in machine systems, and the reason we find them easy is because a large chunk of the brain is devoted to making sense of sounds, images, smells, etc. My research is specifically focused on the auditory cortex. In my doctoral and postdoctoral work, we found evidence that there are distinct neural populations in the human brain that respond highly selectively to music, speech, and singing; the music and songselective populations were particularly surprising and had not been seen clearly before, in part because they required more sophisticated computational methods to uncover them.

What brought you to the University of Rochester?

I have a joint position between the departments of Biostatistics and Computational Biology and Neuroscience, which is an ideal fit for someone like me who has substantial methodological and experimental interests. Rochester has strong neuroscience, statistics, and auditory communities, and the Medical Center has an outstanding neurology team, with whom I am collaborating to collect intracranial data.

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F E AT U R E

A group, mostly consisting of neuroscientists, meets bi-weekly outside the lab with a simple but powerful common purpose – to fundamentally change the bench.

“This experience has been eye-opening,” said Manuel Gomez-Ramirez, Ph.D., assistant professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester and chair of the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience Diversity Commission. “It is such a diverse group in every sense – cultural, gender, experience in both academics and nonacademics – we are all able to have input and listen to each other while considering different perspectives and focusing on one problem together.”

In 2020, the Neuroscience Diversity Commission (NDC) was formed following a letter penned by the director of the Del Monte Institute, John Foxe, Ph.D., in response to the death of George Floyd. It read in part: “For people of good intention and loving heart, this is a profoundly uncomfortable time. We are left to wonder what we can do. But we need to be asking ourselves also, what have we not done?

Expressions of support and aspirations to diversity are all very well, the establishment of diversity offices and appointment of dedicated deans for equity and inclusion represent real progress, but words are just words, and these actions are only a beginning.

Transformational change requires bold and decisive action.”

Nathan A. Smith, Ph.D., M.S. (’10), Ph.D. (’13), read the letter while he was in Washington, D.C., serving as principal investigator and the director of Basic Neuroscience Research in the Center for Neuroscience Research at The Children's

National Hospital and Research Institute and assistant professor of Pediatrics and Pharmacology and Physiology at George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences. Though states away, he felt drawn to become part of the percolating movement at his alma mater. “I went through it. I was the first African American to graduate from the [Neuroscience Graduate] program. I had to be a part of the change to create a more diverse and inclusive environment.

I did not create the problem, but I wanted to be a part of the solution to fix it,” Smith said, who has since returned to Rochester as an associate professor of Neuroscience and associate dean for Equity and Inclusion in Research and Research Education in the School of Medicine and Dentistry.

“I believe in the mission here. I think that by putting the right people at the table, we can make a substantial change in the areas of diversity, equity, and inclusion. I want to be a part of that and make sure we get it right.”

June 2020 was pivotal for diversity, equity, and inclusion at the University of Rochester Medical Center and School of Medicine and Dentistry. It was the month that the CEO of URMC and SMD Dean Mark Taubman, M.D., committed to a comprehensive equity and anti-racism plan for our Medical Center. Adrienne Morgan, Ph.D., vice president for Equity and Inclusion, URMC and senior associate dean for Equity and Inclusion, SMD, took the helm of this initiative. Two months later, she also became a member of the NDC. “The Neuroscience Diversity Commission should be the model that other departments look to in this space,” Morgan said. “The fact that they have brought in external people to be a part of their efforts to get a more diverse sense of what is happening in the world and bring that back to our institution and share what we are doing outward has been transformative.”

The Neuroscience Diversity Commission (opposite image, top) From left (back): Bryan Redmond, Adrienne Morgan, Ph.D., Shaun Nelms, Ph.D., Shraddah Shah. From left (front): Manuel GomezRamirez, Ph.D., Tufikameni Brima, Ph.D., Benjamin Suarez-Jimenez, Ph.D., Elizabeth Berry, Nathan A. Smith, Ph.D.

From left: John Foxe, Ph.D., Nathan A. Smith, Ph.D., and Benjamin Suarez-Jimenez, Ph.D. 4

NDC members not pictured: Katherine Andersh, John GonzalezAmoretti, Chigusa Kurumada, Ph.D., Sarah Latchney, Ph.D., Ania Majewska, Ph.D., Monique Mendes, Ph.D., Victoria Popov, Keshov Sharma, Rianne Stowell, Ph.D., and Kathryn Toffolo.

UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER | ERNEST J. DEL MONTE INSTITUTE FOR NEUROSCIENCE

NEUROSCIENCE | VOL 13, 2022 5

for the future of science. Progress in neuroscience depends on having the best researchers doing the work. And to find the best, we must provide access to all."

NEUROCITY scholar, Raysa Rosario, works with Neuroscience Graduate Program student Mark Stoessel in the Majewska Lab in the Neuroscience department at URMC.

NEUROCITY

CREATING A PATHWAY TO THE BENCH The NDC is organized across three main action groups – Pathways, Cultural Transformation, and Community Connections. Under the Pathways umbrella, two programs aim to provide real-world lab access to historically marginalized, minoritized, or excluded students.

NEUROCITY developed as a partnership with City College of New York. In its first year, eight students spent 10 weeks working in neuroscience research labs and living on the University of Rochester campus. “The program has helped me tremendously to understand how graduate school and research work. It has also allowed me to explore the neuroscience field, something that I never thought of doing before, and now it is a career I am considering pursuing,” one of the program’s scholars said.

NEUROEAST is another Pathway program created by the NDC. This program is a partnership with East High School in the Rochester City School District. East is designed and monitored by the University of Rochester's Warner School of Education and Human Development. High school juniors and seniors rotate through multiple labs for the academic year and learn how to navigate the education and training necessary to pursue a career in research. “It’s changed my life. I want to do this for my life,” said one of the students in the program.

Another expressed how it has encouraged their love of science.

They now have a desire to pursue teaching the subject.

“These programs have created invaluable partnerships,” said Gomez-Ramirez. “Being able to provide these students a realworld experience working in research labs sets the foundation

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TRANSFORMING THE CULTURE OF ACADEMIA Creating this access is only sustainable if the support for trainees and faculty is also in place. The NDC’s effort to diversify the bench aims to give students faculty who look like them and cultivate a place that values different perspectives and backgrounds. Smith’s move back to Rochester is an example of this momentum. “I know this work is not going to fix everything overnight,” said Smith. “But by saying these are the issues or problems that need to be addressed and not shying away from them is the start to making the systemic changes necessary to transform academia.”

There is a depth of experience levels on the NDC, and students like Shraddha Shah, a neuroscience graduate student who has been with the commission since its inception, play an integral role in its effort. She is an intricate part of the group implementing the Lab Mentorship Certification Program. This program will train both mentors and mentees and give them tools to create a more equitable and inclusive lab environment.

She is also a founding member of the Neuroscience Graduate Program Student Solidarity Organization (SSO), which has provided an avenue for gathering student perspectives to bring to the NDC. It has allowed the groups to work collaboratively toward a similar goal.

“One of the hard and early lessons one learns in academia is the immense value that the ‘hidden curriculum’ plays in one’s success, especially if you are a trainee,” Shah said. “An important goal for me working on the mentorship project has been to work toward eliminating these knowledge gaps.

I am very excited that our pilot versions of the program had significant mentee participation and feedback. And that we were also able to work with mentors as well. It is a special feeling to see ideas in action that hold the potential to lead to systemic changes. It has only been possible due to the intentionality that the SSO and NDC have brought into the process, providing a space to put forth our most genuine selves and voice frustrations about the broken parts of our systems.”

"I feel that there is a groundswell that has not been there before."

UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER | ERNEST J. DEL MONTE INSTITUTE FOR NEUROSCIENCE

NEUROEAST

From right: Lulu Abdullahi, a junior at East High School, practices soldering to repair an experiment component with Gomez-Ramirez (center) in The Haptics Lab. Catalina Feistritzer (left), a University of Pittsburgh senior participating in UR’s Summer Research Program, looks on.

Collaboration is a key component to the success of the NDC. A new seminar series – NEURO YES – Neuroscience Young Investigator Extramural Seminar is being hosted

by NDC, the Center for Visual Science, and the Brain and Cognitive Sciences department. This series will bring earlycareer investigators to the University of Rochester to share their work and elevate their experience and exposure while creating a network of scientists interested in building an inclusive and equitable culture in academia. The first speakers will come to the University in fall 2022.

CHANGING SCIENCE Providing a space where people from different backgrounds can conduct research will cultivate a culture where better ideas, questions, and ultimately research can be born. This work could also change what study subjects look like, providing valuable information to the neuroscience community for all demographics. “I think making sure that scientists also look at

their research through their diversity, equity, and inclusion lens is important,” said Morgan. “This is significant because when we look at studies, they very rarely involve diverse populations.

DEI efforts remind researchers that they need to be more inclusive in the research that they are doing.”

KEEPING MOMENTUM This year marks two years since NDC started, and its work seems far from waning. But change has come to the commission as students graduate. New people are joining, but it leaves questions about how the work will be sustained for the long term. According to Morgan, setting measurable goals is one way to ensure efforts continue.

“I also think having everyone at the table is key. And so is constant engagement,” Smith said. “You have to have the conversation. Yes, you will get tired, but being tired does not negate your responsibility for creating a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment. It is our job to continue to train the best scientists for the future. And if we are going to do that, we have to have it open for all.”

“We have created an awareness amongst people that this is the work we need to do; this is the blueprint that we put in place to get there,” said Morgan, reflecting on the NDC and the URMC Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. “We need people to come along with us, and I feel that there is a groundswell that has not been there before to do the work in the diversity, equity and inclusion space.”

From left: Suarez-Jimenez, Shah, Berry, and Smith.

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S T U D E N T S P OT L I G H T

Victoria Popov is a second year in the Neuroscience Graduate Program at the University of Rochester Medical Center. Popov graduated from Rochester Institute of Technology with an M.S. in professional studies with concentrations in biomedical sciences, psychology, and health systems administration. She graduated with a B.S. from RIT in biomedical sciences.

Popov is currently working in the lab of John Foxe, Ph.D., and Ed Freedman, Ph.D., where her research aims to gain a better understanding of the underlying neurophysiological processes that contribute to the decline in cognitive and social functions in individuals with neurocognitive disorders. She is particularly interested in schizophrenia spectrum disorders. “A long-term goal I have is to examine the effects of deafness on cognitive and social functioning in individuals with and without schizophrenia spectrum disorders at the neurophysiological levels. Past psychological studies have shown that individuals who are Deaf view auditory hallucinations in their primary language modality. However, the underlying neurophysiological processes and networks involved are unexplored.”

Victoria Popov is demonstrating the gelling technique for a 64-channel small-medium human electroencephalography (EEG) cap placed on a mock human head. The photo was taken in the Frederick J. and Marion A. Schindler Cognitive Neurophysiology Laboratory within the Center for Advanced Brain Imaging and Neurophysiology (CABIN) at the Del Monte Institute.

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Victoria Popov

As a student who is deaf, Popov is working outside of the lab to develop programs that will increase diversity and inclusion, particularly for those who are D/deaf or hard of hearing, in STEM-related fields. Popov chose the University of Rochester for her doctoral work because of the support she knew she’d receive. “Because of my bilateral profound sensorineural hearing loss, it takes a team to navigate the computational neuroscience field. I need an in-person captionist to receive equal access in classrooms, during talks, and in various aspects of research. The University of Rochester was rapid in bringing together several departments and individuals to develop and ensure I had the support services I need.”

Popov recently became a member of the Del Monte Institute Neuroscience Diversity Commission and came to the University as part of the Post-baccalaureate Research Education Program (PREP) at URMC. PREP encourages students from historically marginalized, minoritized, or excluded groups to pursue a research doctorate. She was also a Rochester Bridges to the Doctorate scholar while at RIT – an NIH-funded program that aims to increase the number of D/deaf and hard-of-hearing (D/HH) individuals who pursue a Ph.D. “There are very few Deaf and hard of hearing individuals in the STEM field, and I want to change that. Every individual is different and the only way we can accurately represent society is if there is better representation at the bench, because that will trickle down to better representation among subjects,” said Popov. “And that will have a major impact on science.”

UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER | ERNEST J. DEL MONTE INSTITUTE FOR NEUROSCIENCE

NEWS BRIEFS

Experimental gene therapy targets Duchenne muscular dystrophy Children in Rochester were among the first in the U.S. to receive an experimental treatment for Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). University of Rochester Medical Center was one of the first three sites in the nation to start dosing patients in a phase 3 placebo-controlled clinical trial for a gene therapy being developed by Sarepta Therapeutics for children with DMD. Emma Ciafaloni, M.D., a neuromuscular neurologist with the URMC department of Neurology and Golisano Children’s Hospital, is leading the Rochester study site. The study is part of an accelerating trend of clinical trials involving gene therapies that could transform how we treat a number of devastating childhood neurological disorders.

Emma Ciafaloni, M.D., with the UR Medicine Pediatric Neuromuscular Medicine Program, talks with Charlie Prior, 6. Prior is one of the first children in the U.S. to be enrolled in the new gene therapy study.

Researchers restore brain immune system function after prenatal exposure to environmental toxin Researchers show that exposure to the industrial byproduct TCDD in utero could cause the brain’s immune system to go awry later in life, damaging important brain circuits, and potentially giving rise to neurodevelopmental disorders, such as autism and ADHD. TCDD is primarily released into the environment by vehicle exhaust and burning wood, and low levels of the toxin are found in air, soil, and food. The most common way people are exposed is through consumption of meat, dairy, and fish.

In the same study, recently published in the journal Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, researchers also found that pharmacological manipulation could restore the function of microglia, important cells in the brain’s immune system.

“This suggests that defects in microglia function resulting from prenatal exposures can be reversed later in life, indicating a possible additional therapeutic avenue for neurodevelopmental disorders,” said Rebecca Lowery, Ph.D., assistant research professor of Neuroscience at the Del Monte Institute, and co-first author of the study.

Huntington’s study recognized for potential to ‘Shape Medicine’ The journal Nature Medicine has identified a phase 3 study of pridopidine as a treatment for Huntington’s disease as one of 11 clinical trials that will shape medicine in 2022. The URMC Clinical Trials Coordination Center is providing global operational support for the study, which is being conducted at more than 50 sites across the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Europe.

The journal notes that the PROOF-HD clinical trial is one of several ongoing studies of pridopidine as a potential therapy for Huntington’s, ALS, and other neurodegenerative diseases. Pridopidine is an oral small-molecule that binds and activates the Sigma-1 receptor (S1R), which is present at high levels within the brain. By activating S1R, the drug helps boost production of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, a protein with neuroprotective properties. These protein levels are found at reduced levels in people with Huntington’s disease.

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S AV E T H E D AT E : 2 0 2 2 S Y M P O S I U M Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience & University of Rochester Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center Symposium DEVELOPMENTAL EMERGENCE OF NEURAL CIRCUIT ARCHITECTURE AND FUNCTION June 9, 10 & 11, 2022 Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, NY delmonte.urmc.edu 3254_4/13/22