At Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the cancer biologist is combining research into the tumor microenvironment with the principles of neuroscience to tease apart how cancers grow—and how to stop them.
Pharmaceutical companies ramp up efforts to get the brain’s immune cells to help treat Alzheimer’s disease and other conditions, but not everyone agrees the approach will be effective.
A pool of neural stem cells that ordinarily lies dormant in the brains of adult mice spawns two types of never-before-documented glial cells when artificially reactivated, potentially pointing to a novel mechanism of brain plasticity.
In mice, the brain’s main glial cell type exhibits distinctive patterns of activity across the sleep-wake cycle and influences the response to sleep deprivation.
Marian Diamond, a former University of California, Berkeley, professor, discovered the first evidence for neuroplasticity and studied Einstein’s brain.
Ben Barres recast glial cells from supporting actors to star performers, crucial for synaptic plasticity in the brain and for preventing neurodegenerative disorders.
Glial cells were once considered neurons’ supporting actors, but new methods and model organisms are revealing their true importance in brain function.
