Saturday, November 5, 2016

On Path To Alzheimer's Cure, Australian Team Analyzes Petabytes Of Data: VIDEO

Image Source: AUSTRALIANCANCERRESEARCHFOUNDATION

A research team from the Queensland Brain Institute in Australia is about a year away from moving to clinical trials on a breakthrough treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, a form of dementia that takes the lives of more than 40 million people worldwide each year, with an estimated cost of $600 billion.

QBI’s treatment is unique in that it makes use of noninvasive high-frequency ultrasound—not drugs—to clear a path for blood proteins to enter the brain and clear out clusters of lesions that cause memory loss and a decline in cognitive functions in Alzheimer’s patients.

Back in March 2015, the QBI team reported in Science Translational Medicine that its ultrasound treatments restored the memory of 75% of the transgenic mice (those engineered to get Alzheimer’s) it tested, with no damage to the surrounding brain tissue. The challenge now for QBI is to optimize those ultrasound treatments for humans, who have much thicker skulls. Just turning up the power would generate too much heat and damage brain tissue.

The team at QBI, part of the University of Queensland, is now testing modified ultrasound treatments to penetrate sheep skulls and human skulls created on 3-D printers. It’s also working in parallel with a couple of companies to develop an optimized transducer, the device that generates the ultrasound.

The goal is to move to small clinical trials (100 or so people) in Australia by late 2017, pending the go-ahead of the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), the country’s equivalent of the US FDA, says Professor Pankaj Sah, QBI’s director. In the best-case scenario, the treatment would be available to the general public in about five years, Sah says, compared with the 10- to 15-year approvals process typical for major drugs.

Truly Big Data

Collaborating with peers worldwide, a QBI team of about a dozen researchers is generating huge imaging and genomic data sets to inform its work. In all, QBI is storing about 7 petabytes (7 million gigabytes) of structured and unstructured data. That data includes images of cells and other microscopic brain matter, MRI brain scans for Alzheimer’s patients and animals going back 12 years, data on the electrical phenomena associated with nervous system activity, as well as generic administrative data.

QBI is managing those 7 petabytes of data in Oracle Hierarchical Storage Manager, tiered software that provides a simple way for researchers to securely access, retain, and protect data throughout its lifecycle. “Maintaining 7 petabytes of unstructured data is hard,” says Jake Carroll, senior IT manager at QBI. “We use Oracle HSM to precisely retrieve from cold storage where appropriate so that we can get the data through our computational pipelines and back to supercomputers.”

For example, researchers will conduct supercomputer analyses comparing brain scans of transgenic animals to those of normal brains. “The scan of one brain might take up 5 or 6 gigabytes or sometimes 10 gigabytes, and you want to compare it to a store of maybe 100 normal brains because of variations from brain to brain,” Sah says.

Or researchers may want to analyze data, stored in different regions, on electrical activity in human or animal brains. “This is now doing a signal analysis, if you like, comparing signals from one brain to another brain,” he says. “Or it’s from the same brain under different conditions.”

Ultrasound Treatments

Clinicians worldwide already use ultrasound in a variety of procedures—to examine bone joints, kidney stones, and fetuses in pregnant women, for example.

Dealing with the brain is more difficult. QBI’s ultrasound treatments work by beaming sound waves into the brain tissue. Those sound waves, absorbed by micron-size bubbles injected into the bloodstream, vibrate, temporarily opening the blood-brain barrier, a tight juncture that protects the brain from bacteria.

At the same time, small proteins from the bloodstream can enter the brain and stimulate the brain’s waste-removing microglial cells, “the vacuum cleaners of the brain,” Sah says. This process helps clear out the amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles that cause memory loss, confusion, and other debilitating effects of Alzheimer’s.

There are other research paths toward a cure for Alzheimer’s, of course. A small clinical trial of a drug called Aducanumab, for example, has shown promise in removing the brain toxins that trigger Alzheimer’s in people, reports science journal Nature. And separate early-stage research studies indicate that a drug used to treat heart and kidney disease as well as one to relieve menstrual sickness actually restored brain functions in mice.

Story Source: The above story is based on materials provided by FORBES

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length
Click here to see more

Labels: Video