{"id":7639,"date":"2011-04-19T09:18:09","date_gmt":"2011-04-19T13:18:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=7639"},"modified":"2011-04-19T12:44:25","modified_gmt":"2011-04-19T16:44:25","slug":"personalized-medicine-brainnet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2011\/04\/19\/personalized-medicine-brainnet\/","title":{"rendered":"personalized medicine: BRAINnet&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p align=\"justify\">In the last post, I mentioned two distinct groups [<strong><font color=\"#200020\">BRAINnet <\/font><\/strong>and <strong><font color=\"#200020\">Brain Resources<\/font><\/strong>], but the distinction between them is not altogether clear. In this post, I&#8217;ll first simply try to clarify what <strong><font><strong><font color=\"#660033\">BRAINnet <\/font><\/strong><\/font><\/strong>actually is, not evaluate it. That&#8217;s for a later time:      <\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\">From the <u><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.brainnet.net\/\"><strong><font color=\"#660033\">BRAINnet<\/font><\/strong><\/a><\/u> website:<\/div>\n<ul>\n<div align=\"justify\"><sup><img decoding=\"async\" width=\"94\" hspace=\"4\" border=\"0\" align=\"right\" src=\"http:\/\/www.brainnet.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/12\/brainnet_logo.png\" \/>The goal of BRAINnet is to expand our knowledge on what constitutes  healthy development of the brain across all ages and what goes awry when  brain disorders occur. To accomplish this goal BRAINnet has formed a  global consortium of investigators, and provides them with access to  multiple types of data acquired from the same individuals.&nbsp; The  immediate goal of access to each set of data is to write a specific  paper for peer-reviewed publication. The topic of this paper is approved  by the BRAINnet membership working in the same or related areas.<\/sup><\/div>\n<p align=\"justify\"><sup>BRAINnet was established in 2003 as a global linkage of scientists,  based in five founding sites. Since 2003, the member network has grown  substantially. Publication output has reached an average of one paper  per week, with many published in leading scientific journals such as  Molecular Psychiatry, Journal of Neuroscience, Neuropsychopharmacology,  American Journal of Psychiatry and Biological Psychiatry.<\/sup><\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\"><sup>BRAINnet Foundation was set up in 2011 as a result of the global  growth in membership and outcomes and the need to fully understand the  brain. The goal of the BRAINnet Foundation is to accommodate the growth  of BRAINnet as a transparent and independent network that facilitates  scientific outcomes and their benefits to the wider community. The  BRAINnet Foundation is an independent, non-profit entity providing the  stewardship and governance of BRAINnet operating via this website.<\/sup><\/div>\n<\/ul>\n<div align=\"justify\">So the gist of things is that <strong><font><strong><font color=\"#660033\">BRAINnet<\/font><\/strong><\/font><\/strong> will maintain a growing database of Brain information on individuals that can be accessed by members for their own research; members are nominated by other members; and the use of the retrieved information is loosely monitored by committees of other members. So where did the data in this database come from? <strong><font color=\"#660033\">Brain Resource<\/font><\/strong> donated access to the existing <strong><font color=\"#660033\">Brain Resource <\/font><\/strong>database [I told you it was hard to distinguish between them].<\/div>\n<ul>\n<div align=\"justify\"><sup>The Brain Resource International Database is the largest available  library of&nbsp; human brain health information acquired using standardized  measures, so that multiple sources of data are available on the same  individuals. As of June 2009, data from the Brain Resource International Database has been made available to BRAINnet from: 5000 subjects with confirmed status as healthy, 1000 subjects with confirmed status as clinical disorder or extreme function: Major Depressive Disorder, ADHD, First Onset Schizophrenia, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Alzheimer&rsquo;s Disease, Mild Cognitive Impairment, Traumatic Brain Injury, Sleep Apnea, Panic Disorder, Anorexia Nervosa, Obesity.<\/sup><\/div>\n<p align=\"justify\"><sup>The following types of data are available for these subjects, acquired using standardized protocols and platforms: Screening Questionnaires; General and Emotional Cognition; Brain-Body Functions; Genetics; MRI, fMRI and DTI.<\/sup><\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\"><sup>Under these protocols, each measure has been implemented under the  supervision, sign off and publication of experts in each field.&nbsp; The  quality [including psychometric properties] of the measures have also  been established and published.<\/sup><\/div>\n<\/ul>\n<div align=\"justify\">They describe the contents of the database <a href=\"http:\/\/www.brainnet.net\/about\/brain-resource-international-database\/\" target=\"_blank\"><u><strong>here<\/strong><\/u><\/a> and give this article as an example of a publication from the data in the database [see below for example version 2]:<\/div>\n<blockquote>\n<div align=\"center\"><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pubmed?term=Interactions%20between%20BDNF%20Val66Met%20polymorphism%20and%20early%20life%20stress%20predict%20brain%20and%20arousal%20pathways%20to%20syndromal%20depression%20and%20anxiety\" target=\"_blank\"><font color=\"#200020\">Interactions  between BDNF Val66Met polymorphism and early life stress predict brain  and arousal pathways to syndromal depression and anxiety<\/font><\/a>.<\/strong><br \/>                  by Gatt JM, Nemeroff CB, Dobson-Stone C, Paul RH, Bryant RA, Schofield PR, Gordon E, Kemp AH, Williams LM.<br \/>                  <strong><font color=\"#200020\">Molecular Psychiatry<\/font><\/strong>. 2009 Jul;14(7):681-95.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<div align=\"justify\">They go on to explain:<\/div>\n<ul>\n<div align=\"justify\"><sup>Because Brain Resource International Database uses standardized  measures to acquire all information, different types of information from  clinical history to genetics can be integrated within the same  individuals, across cohorts [normative and clinical] and across sites. The focus on a standardized, integrative approach was developed to:<\/sup><\/div>\n<ol>\n<div align=\"justify\"><sup>&bull; Realize the emergence of Integrative Neuroscience, as established by  its founder, Evian Gordon, Chair and CEO Brain Resource Ltd.<\/sup><\/div>\n<div align=\"center\">[<strong><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Integrative_neuroscience\">http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Integrative_neuroscience<\/a><\/strong>].<\/div>\n<div align=\"justify\"><sup>&bull; Address the challenges of neuroscience and brain health research. A  Major challenges were highlighted in the article on Databasing the Human  Brain in Nature (2000): the proliferation of specialties that do not  talk to each other, the difficulties of data collation, and the  tradition of data hugging by scientists. The need for large scale  science to understand the brain has been highlighted [Insel et al.,  2004. Nature Neuroscience].<\/sup><\/div>\n<div align=\"justify\"><sup>&bull; The strategic direction in the integration of neuroscience and  psychiatry, reflected in the development of DSM-V and the need to inform  clinical diagnosis with brain insights. This direction has been  highlighted by NIH Directors (Nature Neuroscience Reviews, 2007) and in  the NIH Strategic Plan.<\/sup><\/div>\n<\/ol>\n<\/ul>\n<div align=\"justify\">And who runs <font><strong><font color=\"#660033\">BRAINnet<\/font><\/strong><\/font>?<\/div>\n<ul>\n<div align=\"justify\"><sup>&bull; <em>Inaugural Chair and CEO:<\/em> <u><strong><font color=\"#200020\">Professor Lea Williams<\/font><\/strong><\/u>: Dr. Lea Williams is a Professor of Cognitive Neuropsychiatry at Sydney  Medical School-Western, University of Sydney, and Director of the Brain  Dynamics Center of Westmead Millennium Institute and University of  Sydney. She is currently a Pfizer senior research fellow.<\/sup><\/div>\n<div align=\"justify\"><sup>&bull; <em>Executive Director: <\/em><u><strong><font color=\"#200020\">Professor Steve Koslow<\/font><\/strong><\/u>: Dr. Koslow provides consultant science advisory services on personalized  medicine to Brain Resource Limited. He is Research Director for the  American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. In 1982 he was appointed as  the first Director of the Neuroscience Research Branch at the NIMH. In  1993, Dr. Koslow initiated the multi-Agency initiative on the Human  Brain Project (HBP) to establish an enabling electronic communication  computer based distributed database and knowledge management system for  the neuroscience community. In 1999 Dr. Koslow was appointed as the  first Director of the Office on Neuroinformatics and an Associate  Director of the NIMH. He continues to serve as the chair of the Federal  Interagency Coordinating Committee on the HBP (FICC-HBP) having worked  to extend the HBP globally using the term &#8216;Neuroinformatics&#8217;. He has also served as the Director of External Relations at  the Allen Institute for Brain Science.<\/sup><\/div>\n<div align=\"justify\"><sup>&bull; <em>Non-executive Director: <\/em><u><strong><font color=\"#200020\">Dr Evian Gordon<\/font><\/strong><\/u> [<strong><font color=\"#660033\">Brain Resource<\/font><\/strong> Representative]: Dr Gordon has over 20 years of experience in human brain research. He was the founding director of the Brain Dynamics Centre at Westmead Hospital and a senior lecturer in the Department of Psychological Medicine at the University of Sydney. He edited the first book on &quot;Integrative Neuroscience&quot; and has more than 160 publications.<\/sup><\/div>\n<\/ul>\n<div align=\"justify\">How does data get into the <strong><font><strong><font color=\"#660033\">BRAINnet <\/font><\/strong><\/font><\/strong>database other than through <strong><font color=\"#660033\">Brain Resource<\/font><\/strong>? The only thing I could find about that was their &quot;Discovery Program&quot;:<\/div>\n<ul>\n<div align=\"justify\"><sup>Researchers have an opportunity to acquire their own new data using  the same standardized protocols as used in BRAINnet datasets. This  opportunity is administered independently from BRAINnet, and is known as  the Discovery option. Researchers using Discovery will typically have  their own research grants to acquire new data. These researchers will have the opportunity to ultimately add their  new data to BRAINnet. This would have a multiplying effect on the  opportunities available to the researcher(s). For instance, by adding  their data to BRAINnet, they would then be able to compare their dataset  on say, schizophrenia, with data sets from other clinical groups such  as depression, acquired using the identical platforms.<\/sup><\/div>\n<\/ul>\n<div align=\"justify\">So <strong><font><strong><font color=\"#660033\">BRAINnet<\/font><\/strong><\/font><\/strong> itself is simply a database of a wide variety of information related to the brain on a group of subjects who range from healthy through the variety of mental health diagnoses. The exact nature of that information is at this point sometimes clear [Genetics, MRI, fMRI, DTI] and at other times less clear [Screening Questionnaires, General and Emotional Cognition, Brain-Body Functions]. This data was donated by <strong><font color=\"#660033\">Brain Resource<\/font><\/strong>, a company yet to be described, run by <strong><font color=\"#660033\">Dr. Evian Gordon<\/font><\/strong> from Australia. The database is available widely to people who become members for their own research &#8211; under the guidance of a consortium of other members. <strong><font><strong><font color=\"#660033\">BRAINnet <\/font><\/strong><\/font><\/strong>was launched at a meeting held in Washington in 2009 at the Mayflower Hotel attended by a number of &quot;personalized medicine&quot; enthusiasts from medicine, the pharmaceutical industry, government, the insurance industry, etc. All I&#8217;ve said here is only an introduction to the video from that conference. If you don&#8217;t watch it, you don&#8217;t really get what <strong><font><strong><font color=\"#660033\">BRAINnet <\/font><\/strong><\/font><\/strong>is. Dr. Gordon himself is only on the video as a voice near the end, so I&#8217;ve provided a short video of him as well:   <\/div>\n<ul>\n<div align=\"justify\">&bull; <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/brainnet.net\/media\/video_action.php?playfor=brainnet&#038;iframe=true&#038;width=770&#038;height=480\"><font color=\"#660033\">The Mayflower<\/font><\/a><\/strong> [30 minutes]:   <\/div>\n<div align=\"justify\">&bull; <strong><a title=\"BRAINnet Standardized Assessments\" href=\"http:\/\/brainnet.net\/\/media\/video_standardized.php?playfor=brainnet&#038;iframe=true&#038;width=770&#038;height=480\"><font color=\"#660033\">Standardized Assessments<\/font><\/a><\/strong> [1 minute]:   <\/div>\n<div align=\"justify\">&bull; <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=d3rFNCPSfCU\" target=\"_blank\"><font color=\"#660033\">Dr. Evian Gordon<\/font><\/a><\/strong> [10 minutes]:   <\/div>\n<\/ul>\n<hr size=\"1\" \/>\n<blockquote>\n<div align=\"center\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.brainnet.net\/brainnet-update\/new-gene-stress-interaction-markers-for-depression-biological-psychiatry-2010\/\" target=\"_blank\"><strong><font color=\"#201000\">Early life stress combined with serotonin 3A receptor and brain-derived neurotrophic factor valine 66 to methionine genotypes impacts emotional brain and arousal correlates of risk for depression<\/font><\/strong><\/a><br \/>   by Gatt Justine M; Nemeroff Charles B; Schofield Peter R; Paul Robert H; Clark C Richard; Gordon Evian; Williams Lea M<br \/>  <strong><font color=\"#200020\">Biological Psychiatry<\/font><\/strong> 2010 68(9):818-24.<\/div>\n<p> <\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\"><sup><u><strong><font color=\"#200020\">BACKGROUND<\/font><\/strong><\/u>: Depression will be the second largest burden of disease by 2020. Developing new tools for identifying risk and ultimately prevention of depression relies on elucidating the integrative relationships between susceptibility markers from gene-stress interactions and how they impact emotional brain and arousal systems. They have largely been studied in isolation.<\/sup><\/div>\n<div align=\"justify\"><sup><u><strong><font color=\"#200020\">METHODS<\/font><\/strong><\/u>: We examined how genetic (brain-derived neurotrophic factor [BDNF] valine 66 to methionine [Val66Met] and serotonin receptor gene 3A [HTR3A]) and early life stress susceptibility factors interact in predicting electroencephalogram (EEG) asymmetry, emotion-elicited heart rate, and self-reported negativity bias, each correlates of risk for depression. Caucasian volunteers (n = 363) were derived from the Brain Resource International Database, via the Brain Research And Integrative Neuroscience Network.<\/sup><\/div>\n<div align=\"justify\"><sup><u><strong><font color=\"#200020\">RESULTS<\/font><\/strong><\/u>: Individuals with both BDNF methionine and HTR3A CC risk genotypes and early life stressors demonstrated a profile of elevated emotion-elicited heart rate and right frontal hyper-activation with right parietotemporal hypoactivation in EEG asymmetry. Elevations in heart rate were a moderator of negativity bias.<\/sup><\/div>\n<div align=\"justify\"><sup><u><strong><font color=\"#200020\">CONCLUSIONS<\/font><\/strong><\/u>: The findings provide new evidence that these gene-stress susceptibility factors contribute to a brain-arousal profile indicative of risk for depression. They are a step toward identifying biological markers for detecting risk before overt symptoms. It would be valuable for future studies to examine comorbidity and specificity issues; for instance, whether these gene-stress factors contribute in different ways to the partially distinct EEG asymmetry profiles found with anxiety.<\/sup><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the last post, I mentioned two distinct groups [BRAINnet and Brain Resources], but the distinction between them is not altogether clear. In this post, I&#8217;ll first simply try to clarify what BRAINnet actually is, not evaluate it. That&#8217;s for a later time: From the BRAINnet website: The goal of BRAINnet is to expand our [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7639"}],"version-history":[{"count":33,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7639\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40095,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7639\/revisions\/40095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}