While neuroscientists have been working on it for decades, treatments for brain diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's are still slow because the brain is the body's most complex and difficult organ to understand. Datasets on brain research, while numerous, are discrete and diverse, and often cannot be described in uniform scientific language.
"Despite the significant investment, we have yet to find a solution to major brain diseases," said Ed Lein, a senior researcher in brain science at the Allen Institute. ”
With funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and support from Amazon Web Services, the Allen Institute is leading the Brain Knowledge Platform to address this issue.
Dr. Rebecca Hodge, assistant researcher, Allen Institute for Brain Science (Photo by Erik Dinnel, Allen Institute)
Part of the Brain Knowledge Platform's work is to create a new, complete map of the brain accurate to a single cell, led by Lein and neuroscience researchers at 17 research institutions around the world. In addition, Shoaib Mufti, director of data and technology at Allen Institute, led a team in collaboration with Amazon Web Services to use this brain map to create the world's largest open-source database of brain cells. This is the first time that large-scale datasets on mammalian brain structure and function have been compiled and standardized.
The program works to better diagnose and treat mental and neurological disorders that affect more than one-fifth of the U.S. population and cost the U.S. $1.5 trillion in economic losses each year.
"Chemistry has the periodic table, genomics has a very transformative map of the human genome, neuroscience has similar foundational resources, and the brain knowledge platform will help create this resource," Lein said. ”
Dr. Ed Lein, Senior Investigator in Brain Science, Allen Institute (Photo by Erik Dinnel, Allen Institute)
At the heart of the platform is single-cell genomics. With new techniques for measuring the genes of individual brain cells, researchers can now better understand the complexity of brain cells and the genes that give them their unique functions. These highly detailed cell maps will help researchers understand the origins of diseases and ultimately help clinicians pinpoint the causes of diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
"Researchers will use this knowledge platform to gain new discoveries that are not available with existing infrastructure." Mufti said, "Once the scattered pieces of information are connected to each other, we can correlate data from healthy brains with information from diseased brains — which unlocks huge potential." ”
The platform can also correlate brain studies from different species, and Lein expects that the knowledge graph will eventually be able to integrate biological information from all mammals.
It's the cloud that turns the data generated by the brain's roughly 200 billion cells into open-source tools that can be stored, analyzed, and accessed. Based on this, clinicians may be able to find treatments for brain diseases. Amazon Web Services' high-performance computing power and Amazon SageMaker help Allen Institute manage all of its data and scale across multiple workloads. The Allen Institute is using Amazon Web Services' artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) services and plans to deploy generative AI in the future to turn large, complex, multimodal data into insights.
Researchers at the Allen Institute for Brain Science (Photo by Erik Dinnel, Allen Institute)
"With Amazon Web Services machine learning technology, research institutions are able to identify new correlations and discoveries using purpose-built AI services." Allyson Fryhoff, Managing Director of Amazon Web Services' Nonprofit Healthcare Venture, said, "The Allen Institute is using advanced cloud technologies such as machine learning to further accelerate scientific discovery in a cost-effective and scalable manner. We are impressed by their courage in exploring the unsolved mysteries of the human brain, and we look forward to new breakthroughs in brain research in the future. ”
David Van Essen, a professor of neuroscience at Washington University in St. Louis in Missouri and a research partner at the Allen Institute, has been working on the brain for more than 50 years. He likens the accelerated changes in brain research to the evolution of maps.
"Centuries ago, our maps, though colorful, were rather shallow and reflected only what people knew about the Earth's surface at the time. Cartographers at the time only roughly knew the location of continents and islands, as well as the main geographical and political divisions, but they were not very accurate. "In recent years, the explosion of information and advances in satellite imagery technology have made navigation tools increasingly accurate and convenient." We also aspire to draw increasingly detailed maps in the field of human brain research, making it a powerful navigation tool for treating brain diseases. ”
Lein and his team have just launched the five-year human brain mapping project, much like the previous Human Genome Project, which has the potential to open the door to new discoveries in all fields of medicine, including neuroscience.
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