Welcome to Neuroscience Ireland

TCD Researchers Develop a Second Groundbreaking New Test for the Prediction and Risk Assessment of Early Alzheimer’s Disease.
A major diagnostic breakthrough for Alzheimer’s disease has been developed by Professor Harald Hampel, and his research team based at the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience (TCIN) and the Adelaide & Meath Hospital incorporating the National Children’s Hospital (AMiNCH), Tallaght. This is the second complimentary new discovery in Alzheimer’s disease in recent months led by the TCD/AMiNCH research team, and has been published in the world-leading neurology journal, BRAIN, and top-level American Psychiatry journal Archives of General Psychiatry.
In a collaboration with basic research partners from the United States the TCD researchers developed a new cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) based test for the detection of early Alzheimer’s disease. The test allows for the CSF-based measurement of an enzyme called BACE1 that is known to be essential in the production of beta-amyloid (Aß) which is progressively accumulated and deposited in the patient’s brains (‘amyloid plaques’) and represents a key mechanism in brain pathology in Alzheimer’s disease. The researchers’ findings pave the way for the assessment of BACE1 as an effective and accurate clinical diagnostic tool, which could significantly improve the early detection of the disease.
Commenting on the significance of this TCD-led new groundbreaking study, Professor Hampel stated: “These new findings reveal that subjects with mild cognitive impairment who are at increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease showed dramatically higher cerebrospinal fluid levels of the BACE1 biomarker than healthy elderly persons. It means that the assessment of BACE1 could be of high clinical value for the early detection and risk assessment of Alzheimer’s disease in elderly persons”.
In the study recently published in BRAIN, data show that BACE1 is a primary candidate biomarker of increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease. The findings in a sample of 150 subjects, including candidates with Alzheimer’s disease, mild cognitive impairment, and older healthy subjects demonstrate that the major genetic risk factor of Alzheimer’s disease – a genotype called ApoE e4 – is associated with increased concentration of the new BACE1 biomarker in cerebrospinal fluid. This genotype is the most important genetic risk factor known so far, accounting for up to 90% of the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease in persons less than 80 years old.
Commenting on the significance of the findings, Dr Michael Ewers, first author of the study and Senior Research Fellow in Professor Hampel’s team at TCIN and AMiNCH said: “The new biomarker is thought to measure the active production of beta-amyloid (Aß) and is thus particularly apt to give insight into the actual state of progression of brain pathology in persons at risk of Alzheimer’s disease. This is especially valuable for the clinical prognosis of whether an elderly person with beginning mild cognitive impairment may be healthy or develop Alzheimer’s disease within a few years”.
Professor Hampel’s research group is clinically following up the subjects with mild cognitive impairment in order to examine whether BACE1 in cerebrospinal fluid predicts the development of Alzheimer’s disease within a clinically meaningful time interval of 2-3 years. Professor Hampel stated: “Preliminary results of the follow-up study provide a first promising hint that concentrations of the biomarker BACE 1 in combination with the ApoE genotype enable enhanced accuracy in the early pre-dementia detection and prognosis of an underlying ongoing Alzheimer’s disease manifestation in the patient’s brains. In a next substantial research step we are developing blood-based biomarkers and modern neuroimaging based methods to support early detection and prediction and to bring new effective treatments to Irish patients as soon as they become available. This promising research programme is running at TCIN and AMiNCH, Tallaght.”

Official Launch of the Centre for Pain Research, NUI Galway
NUI Galway formally launched the recently approved Centre for Pain Research (CPR) on Wednesday, 3 October, 2007. CPR aims to provide a centre of excellence for interdisciplinary research between the University and colleagues in the health service with the aim of advancing the scientific understanding of pain from the basic sciences to the population level.

Chronic, persistent pain affects millions of people worldwide, significantly impairing health and well-being and is the most common symptom for which patients seek medical help. In Ireland, over half a million people suffer from chronic pain on a daily basis. As Ireland’s first dedicated centre for research into pain, the CPR incorporates researchers from a range of disciplines and is organised into the following five clusters:

• Pre-clinical research
• Psychological and neuropsychological aspects of pain
• Pain treatment and pain management
• Population and policy aspects of pain
• Integration of pre-clinical pain research and clinical practice

Dr. David Finn and Dr Brian McGuire, Co-Directors of the Centre said, “This is a very exciting and important development which puts Galway very firmly on the national and international pain research map”

To mark the launch, guest speakers included two internationally renowned experts in pain research. Professor Chris Main, a clinical psychologist and author of several authoritative multidisciplinary pain management textbooks from University of Keele, gave a keynote address on Psychosocial barriers to effective pain management and Professor Irene Tracey, a recognised leader in the neuroimaging of pain who leads the fMRI unit at University of Oxford, spoke on

Advances in Pain Neuroimaging. In the working population, lower back pain is responsible for more disability than cancer, heart disease, stroke and AIDS combined. One in six people in Ireland suffering from pain has lost a job because of their condition and pain costs the Irish economy over € 1.2 million per week in disability benefit payments alone (Pain in Europe Study, 2003).

For further information please contact: Dr Dave Finn (Pharmacology),
Tel: 091 495280
E-mail: David.Finn@nuigalway.ie
or
Dr Brian McGuire (Psychology)
E-mail: Brian.McGuire@Nuigalway.ie

Co-Directors, Centre for Pain Research or visit: http://www.nuigalway.ie/psychology/CPR.html

NCBES student bound for Mayo Clinic
Aoife Ní Mháille, a PhD student at the National Centre for Biomedical Engineering Science, NUI Galway was recently awarded funding to participate in a multiple sclerosis research project in the prestigious Mayo Clinic in the US.

Aoife, who is a student of Dr Úna Fitzgerald in collaborates with Dr. Stephen McQuaid of Queen’s University Belfast, received an award of €5,175 to fund a 9-week visit to the Mayo Clinic where she will work alongside Dr. Claudia Lucchinetti.

The funding was awarded in a competition run by the Irish Institute of Clinical Neuroscience and jointly funded by Sanofi-Aventis.

Major Grants Awarded
Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience in collaboration with Glaxo-Smithkline Beecham: The focus of the new TCIN/GSK research consortium (2007-2012) is on diseases associated with brain ageing (especially Alzheimer’s Disease). This is first consortium of this type to have occurred in Trinity College, and only the second that GSK have undertaken in Ireland (the first is in UCC on gastrointestinal disease).

We plan to use the knowledge we have about basic brain function and bring it into the clinic in as direct and rapid a fashion as possible. In parallel, we want to explore, using our unique and special laboratory models, the underlying causes of these diseases and disorders so that we can understand what has gone wrong in the brain at the level of cells and networks of cells. Having this kind of explanation available at this simpler level will make it easier to discover ways in which we can try to stop damage progressing (as in Alzheimer’s Disease) and in some cases may allow us to discover ways to reverse the damage that has occurred.

The neuroscience of the future will deliver new and innovative healthcare and this will be the outcome of the combined work of the clinician, the laboratory researcher and industry. Society requires the development of these medical treatments and we have captured some of that future here in this world-leading collaboration, which brings together diverse talents and expertise to drive the development of these medical treatments.

Ireland's First 128-channel EEG Recorded at Maynooth Laboratory We are proud to report that in the past month, Ireland's first 128-channel EEG recordings of electrical brain potentials from the human scalp took place in the Dept of Psychology, NUI Maynooth. The recordings took place Friday 18th and Wed 23rd November, when EEG data were acquired while two postgraduate students from Psychology completed a computer-based memory task.

The first two participants were Jonathan Murphy and Paraic Scanlon (pictured), both of whom are currently working on PhDs in the area of how the brain accomplishes memory, under the joint supervision of Drs Sean Commins and Richard Roche, who carried out the recordings. Fellow Postgraduates Jennifer Moore (supervisor: Dr R Roche) and Sinead Smyth (supervisor: Prof D Barnes-Holmes) also assisted in applying the 128 electrodes to the scalp of their colleagues.

The data were recorded using a BrainVision QuickAmp amplifier in an electrically shielded testing booth. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) are changes in the ongoing electrical activity of the brain (electroencephalogram, EEG) which are caused by the demands of, for example, a cognitive task.
These changes allow neuroscientists to determine what areas of brain are involved in the tasks, precisely when these areas become activated and what happens in these areas when people make an error. ERPs are widely used in research with both normal participants during tasks such as memory, attention and perception, as well as with clinical populations such as Alzheimer's Disease sufferers, schizophrenia patients and those who have sustained brain injury. While other universities in Ireland are carrying out ERP research using 32- or 64-channels (e.g. Trinity, NUI Galway, UCC), last month's recordings represent the first occasion of the use of 128 channels on the island. The use of a high-density electrode array such as this allows more sophisticated analysis procedures to be employed, including source analysis and dipole modelling (in which the neural generators of the scalp-recorded signal can be inferred based on the scalp pattern of activity).
The Dept of Psychology is currenly formalising collaborative links with Prof John Foxe from the Cognitive Neurophysiology Laboratory of the Nathan Kline Institute in New York, a world leader in such high-density recordings.
We believe that this represents an important watershed in Neuroscience research in Ireland, one that will place NUIM at the forefront of cognitive electrophysiology in Europe.