Neuroscience

Right.

And so the first thing I want to just acknowledge is, can I bring a little brain science into this? Because I kind of geek out on this as a scientist, as a former professor and researcher.

I love that I get to bring quantum physics and brain science into the woo.

I love the woo.

Yes, please.

And everything that you posted just resonated with me.

And I think the fact that it's all backed by research and neuroscience just makes it more digestible.

We think this is really true of what you're preaching.

And so I really resonated with that.

I'm still hungry for knowledge.

I want to learn more and more.

And I was really interested in the neuroscience approach.

And at that time, I had no idea you're going to do the circles.

I'm your host, Nicholas Weiler.

Today, we're going to be talking about a recent study that is rewriting neuroscience textbooks as we speak.

This is a discovery that may have major implications for our understanding of Alzheimer's disease and our ability to treat brain diseases more broadly.

To explain what I mean, let's take a step back.

So first, there's the diseases like Alzheimer's disease, where we know microglia are central to disease progression.

But exactly like you said, now that we know that these cells are sort of naturally able to transit across the blood drain barrier, we can think about maybe harnessing that pathway to unlock treatments for a much wider range of brain disorders as well by maybe tethering therapeutic molecules or using those cells to deliver therapeutic molecules into the brain, possibly to other brain cells.

One of the things I find so cool and remarkable about this study is that both you and the Jaiswal lab more broadly sort of come at this as outsiders to neuroscience and neurodegenerative disease research.

And I'd love to hear a little bit more about that.

[laughs]

Yeah, so you can research neuroscience for two days.

So I c- yeah, so I can research neuroscience for fun.

Yeah.

That, this has been a good time for me.

Some of you might know that, some of you probably will be like, "What?" Which is a fair enough response.

Once every 10 years I get a notion to just really delve into science, and recently I sort of half fell in love with someone that was, it was a bad idea, and I wanted to find out why biologically I had done that, and why biologically they hadn't.

And it sent me down a rabbit hole into researching hormones and brain chemicals and neuroscience, and I've been speaking to some neuroscientists, I've been reading a lot of journals, and I think, I feel, feel like I've just figured out everything.

What does it mean? What should we know about this thing that gives us our ability to do all the things that we do in our everyday lives, perceive, think, love, learn, all those things.

But yeah, there's a more specific audience I think we have in mind, which is, I, I know that we reach a lot of people who are working in neuroscience, people who are working in different areas of neuroscience.

It is a very, very big field.

There are people who are doing engineering for brain computer interfaces.

There are people who are thinking about the molecules that are involved in building the brain.

There are people who are thinking about, you know, brain imaging and large scale networks.

And so one of my hopes is that we can bring different stories from the many different frontiers of neuroscience to help unify people who think about the brain.

Um, and then I would say the second category of people who I hope are listening, uh, besides my family, hi, Mom, um, [laughs] is, um, I, I do hear from people, um, ac- across the country, actually around the world.

Today I'm talking with Dr. Tommy Lee.

Tommy is a faculty member in the Department of Neuroscience and Behavior at Barnard College of Columbia University.

A behavioral neuroscientist, he studies how the brain supports episodic memory, our memories of experiences, including where and when events happened and who was there.

After earning his PhD at the University of Connecticut, he held an NIH-IRACTA postdoctoral fellowship at Emory University and taught at Spelman College and Morehouse College.

He was also a pedagogy fellow at Harvard Medical School and Morehouse School of Medicine, and later served as an inaugural postdoctoral teaching fellow at the University of Notre Dame.

An advocate for open science, Tommy co-facilitates an Allen Institute coding workshop that helps educators teach with open data sets.

In a forthcoming chapter for the Oxford Handbook of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education, He examines how generative AI supports student thinking and when it does the thinking for them.

In the classroom, he especially enjoys teaching neuroscience of learning and memory and neuroscience of love.

Psychiatry, for its own reasons, has divided all these, uh, brain symptoms into three hundred and fifty or so separate conditions.

And I think what the latest brain science is showing us is that they're all related, and at most, there might be one or two broad categories, and these are just different variants of the same ones.

And that's super exciting 'cause it means that the, the causes, the mechanisms, and the treatments are likely to be similar.

So you don't have to find three hundred and fifty different causes and treatments.

And it's also telling us that the basic current dogma of brain science, which is all about, uh, brain chemical changes, a lot of deficiencies in the brain in terms of neurochemicals being the cause of all mental illness, is wrong.

Um, and once you take that step, you realize, well, if that's wrong, we need a much more holistic approach, and diet and gut microbiome provide that super holistic approach.

The other thing I've learned is how flexible the brain is.

But it's tough to be upset about a cancer portfolio with a growth rate in the mid-teens for a drug company.

The third-largest subdivision here is Neuroscience, which was up 17.1% thanks to some newer drugs like a nasal spray for depression, that is really selling well, and potentially revolutionary schizophrenia treatment that put up 66% sales growth.

Put it all together and the pharma side of the business had more positives than negatives.

All right, now how about this MedTech thing? All right.