NIH awards UCLA $10M to study brain’s cellular infrastructure

The NIH has awarded nearly $10 million to two scientists at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine for research projects that aim to shed light on the development of the brain’s cellular infrastructure as well as brain disorders.

Chongyuan Luo, PhD, BSc, assistant professor of human genetics, will receive $5.3 million over 5 years to systematically map the gene regulatory landscape across human brain development at a single-cell resolution.

“The database will significantly improve our study of genetic variants associated with psychiatric and neurological disorders,” Luo said in a press release from the university. “More specifically, the dataset can lead to the discovery of specific cell types and genomic regions that mediate the risk of brain diseases.

Aparna Bhaduri, PhD, assistant professor of biological chemistry, will receive $4.3 million over 5 years to examine genetic activity and structure across stages of development.

“With these answers we can then better understand how the brain is normally developed and how it is impacted in neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric disorders,” Bhaduri said in the release.

Both projects’ grants were awarded through NIH’s BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network, a large-scale effort to catalogue cell types and molecular properties in the brain.

“These awards will enable researchers to explore the multifaceted characteristics of the more than 200 billion neurons and non-neuronal cells in the human brain at unprecedented detail and scale — a feat in advanced technologies and cross-team research collaboration that will reveal new paradigms for understanding how pathological changes in particular groups of brain cells could cause neurologic and neuropsychiatric disorders,” NIH BRAIN Initiative director John Ngai, PhD, said in the press release.