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Integrative Neuroscience

The State of Personalized Medicine: The Role of Biomarkers

February 13, 2012 by Dr. Evian Gordon

(Edi­tor’s Note: this is Part 1 of the new 3‑part series writ­ten by Dr. Evian Gor­don draw­ing from his par­tic­i­pa­tion at the Per­son­al­ized Med­i­cine World Con­gress on Jan­u­ary, 23, 2012 at Stan­ford University.)

On aver­age, the med­ica­tions pre­scribed for brain-relat­ed con­di­tions ben­e­fit approx­i­mate­ly 50% of patients. But which 50%?

Per­son­al­ized Med­i­cine seeks to move away from the cur­rent “1 size fits all, tri­al and error” approach that has been nec­es­sary because of a lack of evi­dence. Instead, it focus­es on [Read more…] about The State of Per­son­al­ized Med­i­cine: The Role of Biomarkers

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Filed Under: Brain/ Mental Health Tagged With: biomarkers, brain, Brain-health, breast cancer, Chronic Myloid Leukemia, Erbitux, FDA, Gleevac, Gleevec, health care, Herceptin, Integrative Neuroscience, medications, Melanoma, Mental-Health, Personalized Medicine Coalition, Personalized Medicine World Congress, personalized-medicine, psychiatry, Tarceva, Vectibix, Warfarin, Xalkori, Zelboraf

New Series on Personalized Medicine and the Brain (PMWC 2012)

February 10, 2012 by Alvaro Fernandez

“On aver­age, the med­ica­tions pre­scribed for brain-relat­ed con­di­tions ben­e­fit approx­i­mate­ly 50% of patients.  But which 50%?.”

“We need unam­bigu­ous bio­mark­ers that are clin­i­cal­ly rel­e­vant and scal­able at rea­son­able cost. They already exist in Can­cer.   But they do not yet exist in the Brain.” What may change that? [Read more…] about New Series on Per­son­al­ized Med­i­cine and the Brain (PMWC 2012)

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Filed Under: Brain/ Mental Health Tagged With: biomarkers, brain, Brain-health, health care, Integrative Neuroscience, medications, Mental-Health, Personalized Medicine World Congress, personalized-medicine, psychiatry

36-Hour Offer: Integrative Neuroscience, Personalized Medicine and the 2011 SharpBrains Summit

March 3, 2011 by Alvaro Fernandez

An impres­sive recent ref­er­ence book on the future of brain care is Inte­gra­tive Neu­ro­science and Per­son­al­ized Med­i­cine, edit­ed by Evian Gor­don and Stephen H. Koslow (Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Press; $89.95).

Book descrip­tion: This book takes an in depth and hard look at the cur­rent sta­tus and future direc­tion of treat­ment pre­dic­tive mark­ers in Per­son­al­ized Med­i­cine for the brain from the per­spec­tives of the researchers on the cut­ting edge and those involved in health­care imple­men­ta­tion. The con­tents pro­vide a com­pre­hen­sive text suit­able as both a pithy intro­duc­tion to and a clear sum­ma­ry of the “sci­ence to solu­tions” con­tin­u­um in this devel­op­ing field of Per­son­al­ized Med­i­cine and Inte­gra­tive Neu­ro­science. The sci­ence includes both mea­sures of genes using whole genome approach­es and SNIPS as well as BRAIN­mark­ers of direct brain func­tion such as brain imag­ing, bio­phys­i­cal changes and objec­tive cog­ni­tive and behav­ioral mea­sure­ments. More infor­ma­tion below.

—

36-Hour Offer

Dr. Evian Gor­don will speak at the upcom­ing 2011 Sharp­Brains Sum­mit: Retool­ing Brain Health for the 21st Cen­tu­ry (March 30th — April 1st) and his firm, Brain Resource, is among Sum­mit Spon­sors. Thanks to his sup­port, we are pleased to announce the fol­low­ing offer: TEN pro­fes­sion­als who reg­is­ter to attend the 2011 Sharp­Brains Sum­mit over the next 36 hours, from now until Fri­day March 4th, 7pm US Pacif­ic Time, will each receive a com­pli­men­ta­ry hard­copy of the book Inte­gra­tive Neu­ro­science and Per­son­al­ized Med­i­cine. If more than ten peo­ple reg­is­ter by then, we will select ten names at random.

We are also pleased to announce the addi­tion of 12 new Speak­ers and Mod­er­a­tors to the 2011 Sharp­Brains Sum­mit — the result­ing agen­da is turn­ing out to be noth­ing short of spec­tac­u­lar (in our, yes, a bit biased judgment):

  • Alexan­dra More­house, CMO, AAA North California
  • Dr. Evian Gor­don, CEO, Brain Resource
  • Kath­leen Herath, Asst Vice Pres­i­dent, Nation­wide Insurance
  • Dr. David Tal, Direc­tor, A.G.E. Mat­ters Clinic
  • Paula Psyl­lakis, Senior Pol­icy Advi­sor, Ontario Min­istry of Research and Innovation
  • Veroni­ka Litin­ski, Advi­sor, MaRS Life Sci­ences and Health Care
  • Dr. Joshua Stein­er­man, Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor, Albert Ein­stein Col­lege of Medicine
  • Dr. Jef­frey Kaye, Direc­tor, NIA — ORCATECH
  • Dr. John Rep­pas, Pol­icy Direc­tor, Neu­rotech­nol­ogy Indus­try Organization
  • Dr. Justin Mar­ley, Chair Men­tal Health Infor­mat­ics Group, UK Roy­al Col­lege of Psychiatrists
  • Dr. David Dar­by, Chief Med­ical Offi­cer, Cogstate
  • Dr. John Hart, Med­ical Sci­ence Direc­tor, Cen­ter for Brain Health at UT-Dallas

-> Learn More and Reg­is­ter to Par­tic­i­pate in the Sum­mit Here, and get a chance at get­ting a com­pli­men­ta­ry copy of the book Inte­gra­tive Neu­ro­science and Per­son­al­ized Med­i­cine!

[Read more…] about 36-Hour Offer: Inte­gra­tive Neu­ro­science, Per­son­al­ized Med­i­cine and the 2011 Sharp­Brains Summit

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Filed Under: Education & Lifelong Learning, Technology & Innovation Tagged With: ­Ontario Min­istry of Research and Innovation, A.G.E. Mat­ters Clinic, AAA, Albert Ein­stein Col­lege of Medicine, Alexan­dra More­house, behavioral measurements, brain, brain-function, Brain-Imaging, Brain-Resource, Center for Brain Health, cognitive, CogState, David Darby, David Tal, Evian Gor­don, healthcare, Integrative Neuroscience, Jef­frey Kaye, John Hart, Joshua Stein­er­man, Justin Marley, Kath­leen Herath, Men­tal Health Infor­mat­ics, Nation­wide Insurance, Neuroinformatics, NIA, NIMH, Orcatech, Paula Psyl­lakis, personalized-medicine, predictive markers, Stephen H. Koslow, UK Royal Col­lege of Psychiatrists, UT-Dallas, Veronika Litin­ski

Michael Merzenich on Brain Training, Assessments, and Personal Brain Trainers

December 17, 2009 by Alvaro Fernandez

Dr. Michael Merzenich Dr. Michael Merzenich, Emer­i­tus Pro­fes­sor at UCSF, is a lead­ing pio­neer in brain plas­tic­i­ty research. In the late 1980s, Dr. Merzenich was on the team that invent­ed the cochlear implant. In 1996, he was the found­ing CEO of Sci­en­tif­ic Learn­ing Cor­po­ra­tion (Nas­daq: SCIL), and in 2004 became co-founder and Chief Sci­en­tif­ic Offi­cer of Posit Sci­ence. He was elect­ed to the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ences in 1999 and to the Insti­tute of Med­i­cine this year. He retired as Fran­cis A. Sooy Pro­fes­sor and Co-Direc­tor of the Keck Cen­ter for Inte­gra­tive Neu­ro­science at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia at San Fran­cis­co in 2007. You may have learned about his work in one of PBS TV spe­cials, mul­ti­ple media appear­ances, or neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty-relat­ed books.

(Alvaro Fer­nan­dez) Dear Michael, thank you very much for agree­ing to par­tic­i­pate in the inau­gur­al Sharp­Brains Vir­tu­al Sum­mit in Jan­u­ary, and for your time today. In order to con­tex­tu­al­ize the Sum­mit’s main themes, I would like to focus this inter­view on the like­ly big-pic­ture impli­ca­tions dur­ing the next 5 years of your work and that of oth­er neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty research and indus­try pioneers.

Thank you for invit­ing me. I believe the Sharp­Brains Sum­mit will be very use­ful and stim­u­lat­ing, you are gath­er­ing an impres­sive group togeth­er. I am look­ing for­ward to January.

Neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty-based Tools: The New Health & Well­ness Frontier

There are many dif­fer­ent tech­nol­o­gy-free approach­es to harnessing/ enabling/ dri­ving neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty. What is the val­ue that tech­nol­o­gy brings to the cog­ni­tive health table?

It’s all about effi­cien­cy, scal­a­bil­i­ty, per­son­al­iza­tion, and assured effec­tive­ness. Tech­nol­o­gy sup­ports the imple­men­ta­tion of near-opti­mal­ly-effi­cient brain-train­ing strate­gies. Through the Inter­net, it enables the low-cost dis­tri­b­u­tion of these new tools, any­where out in the world. Tech­nol­o­gy also enables the per­son­al­iza­tion of brain health train­ing, by pro­vid­ing sim­ple ways to mea­sure and address indi­vid­ual needs in each per­son­’s brain-health train­ing expe­ri­ence. It enables assess­ments of your abil­i­ties that can affirm that your own brain health issues have been effec­tive­ly addressed.

Of course sub­stan­tial gains could also be achieved by orga­niz­ing your every­day activ­i­ties that grow your neu­ro­log­i­cal abil­i­ties and sus­tain your brain health. Still, if the ordi­nary cit­i­zen is to have any real chance of main­tain­ing their brain fit­ness, they’re going to have to spend con­sid­er­able time at the brain gym!

One espe­cial­ly impor­tant con­tri­bu­tion of tech­nol­o­gy is the scal­a­bil­i­ty that it pro­vides for deliv­er­ing brain fit­ness help out into the world. Think about how effi­cient the drug deliv­ery sys­tem is today. Doc­tors pre­scribe drugs, insur­ance cov­ers them, and there is a drug store in every neigh­bor­hood in almost every city in the world so that every patient has access to them. Once neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty-based tools and out­comes and stan­dard­ized, we can envi­sion a sim­i­lar sce­nario. And we don’t need all those drug stores, because we have the Internet!

Hav­ing said this, there are obvi­ous obsta­cles. One main one, in my mind, is the lack of under­stand­ing of what these new tools can do. Cog­ni­tive train­ing pro­grams, for exam­ple, seem counter-intu­itive to con­sumers and many pro­fes­sion­als “ why would one try to improve speed-of-pro­cess­ing if all one cares about is mem­o­ry? A sec­ond obvi­ous prob­lem is to get indi­vid­u­als to buy into the effort required to real­ly change their brains for the bet­ter. That buy-in has been achieved for many indi­vid­u­als as it applies to their phys­i­cal health, but we haven’t got­ten that far yet in edu­cat­ing the aver­age old­er per­son that brain fit­ness train­ing is an equal­ly effort­ful business!

Tools for Safer Dri­ving: Teens and Adults

Safe dri­ving seems to be one area where the ben­e­fits are more intu­itive, which may explain the sig­nif­i­cant traction.

Yes, we see great poten­tial and inter­est among insur­ers for improv­ing dri­ving safe­ty, both for seniors and teens. Appro­pri­ate cog­ni­tive train­ing can low­er at-fault acci­dent rates. You can mea­sure clear ben­e­fits in rel­a­tive­ly short time frames, so it won’t take long for insur­ers to see an eco­nom­ic ratio­nale to not only offer pro­grams at low cost or for free but to incen­tivize dri­vers to com­plete them. All­state, AAA, State Farm and oth­er insur­ers are begin­ning to real­ize this poten­tial. It is impor­tant to note that typ­i­cal acci­dents among teens and seniors are dif­fer­ent, so that train­ing method­olo­gies will need to be dif­fer­ent for dif­fer­ent high-risk populations.

Yet, most dri­ving safe­ty ini­tia­tives today still focus on edu­cat­ing dri­vers, rather that train­ing them neu­ro­log­i­cal­ly. We mea­sure vision, for exam­ple, but com­plete­ly ignore atten­tion­al con­trol abil­i­ties, or a dri­ver’s use­ful field of view. I expect this to change sig­nif­i­cant­ly over the next few years.

Long-term care and health insur­ance com­pa­nies will ulti­mate­ly see sim­i­lar ben­e­fits, and we believe that they will fol­low a sim­i­lar course of action to reduce gen­er­al med­ical and neu­rode­gen­er­a­tive dis­ease- (Mild Cog­ni­tive Impair­ment and Alzheimer’s- and Parkin­sons-) relat­ed costs. In fact, many senior liv­ing com­mu­ni­ties are among the pio­neers in this field.

Boomers & Beyond: Main­tain­ing Cog­ni­tive Vitality

Main­stream media is cov­er­ing this emerg­ing cat­e­go­ry with thou­sands of sto­ries. But most cov­er­age seems still focused on does it work? more than “how do we define It”, what does work mean? or work for whom, and for what? Can you sum­ma­rize what recent research suggests?

We have seen clear pat­terns in the appli­ca­tion of our train­ing pro­grams, some pub­lished (like IMPACT), some unpub­lished, some with healthy adults, and some with peo­ple with mild cog­ni­tive impair­ment or ear­ly Alzheimers Dis­ease (AD). What we see in every case: [Read more…] about Michael Merzenich on Brain Train­ing, Assess­ments, and Per­son­al Brain Trainers

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Filed Under: Brain/ Mental Health, Education & Lifelong Learning, Technology & Innovation Tagged With: AAA, adults, Allstate, Alzheimers, automated, brain-assessments, Brain-Fitness, brain-fitness-training, brain-functioning, Brain-games, brain-gym, Brain-health, brain-trainers, Brain-Training, brain-training-software, coaches, cochlear-implant, cogmed, cognitive-science, drug development, efficiency, embedded assessments, FDA, fitness, games, home health, innovation, Institute-of-Medicine, insurers, Integrative Neuroscience, Internet, Keck Center, MATRICS. neurocognitive assessment, MCI, medicine, memory, Mental-Health, Michael-Merzenich, myelination, National-Academy-of-Sciences, neurocognitive, neurodegenerative, neurological, neuroplasticity, neuropsych, neuropsych assessments, NIH, NIH-toolbox, NovaVision, Parkinsons, personal brain trainers, piano teachers, Posit-Science, psychiatric, public-libraries, safer driving, scalability, schizophrenia, Scientific-Learning, SCIL, senior-living, seniors, speed-of-processing, State-Farm, technology, teens, telemedicine, therapy, UCSF, working-memory-training

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