LONGEVITY AND VIBRANCY OF THE BRAIN A salon of scientific […]

LONGEVITY AND VIBRANCY OF THE BRAIN
A salon of scientific discoveries last night, from longevity to mindfulness and psychedelics, to gender differences in the brain. It was a mind spa for me, and big thanks to Michael McCullough, Calvin N’Guyen and Joon Yun for organizing this Brain-Mind gathering. Here are my notes.

We started with Joon, longevity pioneer, Stanford radiologist, and investor:

“As we age, we lose our homestatic capacity, the ‘weeble wobble’ of self-correction. We find it harder to adjust to altitude, red-eye flights, roller coasters and dim light menus. The loss of coprocessing (such as active driving while having a conversation) is a biomarker of aging. If we can restore these functions, we will improve functional longevity. Not dying is the best way to best way to extend longevity. And longevity is a call option on further health improvements.

We are dynamic systems, but we measure static state variables (like blood pressure at rest). Our static state rarely changes; it is our recovery after stress that correlates with age and mortality.

In 1953, the year Watson and Crick described DNA, we stopped research on biological and ovarian aging.

On the current healthcare trajectory in America, everybody dies, and we kill the economy. The healthcare system will put you all out of business. In just 15 years the average cost of healthcare will exceed the average income in America!

It is a market failure. There is no agreed upon biomarker for aging, so there is no FDA endpoint to work toward, and thus, no incentive to improve longevity.”

• Nirao Shah from Stanford Neurobiology & Psychiatry http://med.stanford.edu/nirao.html

“I study how the brain becomes gendered. There is huge gene expression variation by gender, and differences in susceptibility to different diseases. For example, autism is 4x more common in boys than girls whereas PTSD is more common in women than men. Similar significant sex differences exist in Alzheimer’s, anxiety, ADD, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, and schizophrenia.”

“Half of the room is affected by this directly. There is a rewiring of the brain with every menstrual cycle. And it’s not 10 or 20%. There is a 300% change in the connectome in a specific brain region, the hypothalamus that regulates social behavior. And we have found a way to block those changes and related symptoms of dysphoria.”

• Dr. Andy Josephson, the Neurology Dept. Chair at UCSF

“Multiple Sclerosis is the #1 disabler of young people under 50 (excluding accidents). And it has been cured in the past 1.5 years. UCSF developed a drug that if administered after the first MS attack, it stops the disease in its tracks. We are now working on the trigger causes, whether genetic or microbiome and developing drugs for remyelination, for patients who already have MS.”

• Prof. Rael Cahn, USC Brain and Creativity Institute and Director of the new USC Center for Mindfulness.

He is currently studying the epigenetic changes underlying the clinical efficacy of MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy for PTSD in collaboration with MAPS.

“My lab works on mindfulness science, and the main target is the circuitry that supports the Default Mode Network in the brain. When we meditate or when we are in nature we enter a narrative-free awareness, where we can experience without studying what is going on. We spend too much time processing, being stuck in our minds, ruminating on what we might do in the future.”

“I study the mutual benefit of meditation and psychedelics. There was a lot of research in the 50’s and 60’s that showed quite a bit of potential for psychedelics to treat addiction, depression, PTSD, anxiety and autism. It is not a pharmacological treatment, it is a gateway to a mystical experience that is curative” (this reminds me of Michael Pollan’s analogy to an “anti-trauma”, a singular experience that can literally change your mind. Here is a great summary of his latest book: https://tim.blog/2019/03/21/michael-pollan-sxsw )

• Prof. Monica Di Luca, Univ of Milan, and European Brain Council

“I come from Europe where 1/3 of our citizens are living with brain disorders. It costs us 800 billion Euros per year. Neurodegenerative diseases are the most expensive worldwide.”

“The key is to catch it early. Synaptic plasticity changes in neurodegenerative diseases and I study the molecular basis of plasticity. We found that protein complexes in the synapse arise and we have smart peptides that target these protein complexes, restoring the plasticity, restoring cognition and changing behavior.”

• Dr. Rebecca Brachman is a pioneer in preventative psychopharmacology, seeking drugs which enhance psychological resilience against stress and prevent mental illness, like a vaccine for PTSD and depression. These drugs would be taken in advance of stress, and prevent PTSD.

She also co-founded the Social Outcomes Initiative — a social impact organization that repurposes generic drugs for the treatment of PTSD and traumatic brain injury.

“Only 1 in 10,000 new compounds get FDA approval, and most fail in safety. When you repurpose an already approved drug, there is a 1 in 5 success rate, a 200,000% improvement. And there are many cross-over uses because of our bioredundancy of common pathways across organs.”

• Nolan Williams, Director of the Stanford Brain Stimulation Lab:

“One third of treatments for depression don’t work, and these patients are most likely to end their own lives. The highest incidence of suicide is just after discharge from the hospital. When we give these treatment-resistant patients repetitive magnetic transcranial stimulation, an external treatment, we see a full recovery 90% of the time. This is 2x better than any other approved treatment approach. We are trying to get breakthrough therapy status with the FDA to get this to market more quickly.”