MINDFUL . . . Professor Perry Bartlett is leading the fight to prevent dementia and other old age ailments at the Queensland Brain Institute. Picture: Glenn Barnes
ST.LUCIA, Queensland (Courier Mail), February 5, 2008:
THE building has the new smell of a car on a showroom floor, the steel and glass gleaming in the St Lucia sun.
Opened in November at a cost of $63 million, it houses the intellectual power to cure some of the most destructive diseases affecting our society's mental and neurological health.
As I am ushered through the doors of the Queensland Brain Institute, I half expect to see human cerebrum floating in jars of formaldehyde, but there are no brains in evidence in Professor Perry Bartlett's spacious office, just a desk, comfortable chairs and couch and a wall half covered in chemical symbols and mathematical equations.
CEO of the institute, Bartlett – acknowledged as one of the world's pre-eminent brain research scientists – moved to Brisbane from Melbourne five years ago charged with the challenge of establishing a centre of brain research excellence.
"It's been an amazing time," he says, stretching out in a chair and speaking in a slow, but measured cadence, each phrase considered before utterance.
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We started with nothing and now we've got this new building with 200 new scientists. The opportunity to start from scratch and recruit a cohort of new scientists, which I could select and mould into the direction I wanted, was one of the great attractions of coming here. I'm not sure I'd do it again . . . relocating all those people."Ninety per cent of the people in here are new to Queensland and about a third are new to Australia, so settling them in has taken some time."
The Smart State appellation may cause sensitive Queenslanders to squirm, but in this small corner of the University of Queensland campus, it assumes some validity.
"Moving here used to be just about lifestyle," Bartlett says, "but now the University of Queensland in a scientific sense is a very exciting place to be."
Bartlett's focus is to translate his team's research into advances that will directly improve our health and turn back the tide of ageing in the areas of memory loss and loss of learning ability.
"I think we'll not only be able to address problems of memory and learning and the decline of those things, but also address a large proportion of the diseases of mental and neurological ill health," he says.
"Almost 50 per cent of the burden of disease in our community – years lost through premature death or disability – is due to neurological or mental ill health, way above cancer and heart disease yet the amount of money we actually spend in doing fundamental research is way less than on any of those two areas and that's a tragedy."
Bartlett and his associates have made some significant breakthroughs.
In 2002, they discovered a mechanism that may stimulate stem sells in the brain to produce new nerve cells and in 2004 identified a molecule that led to research aimed at the treatment of spinal cord injuries.
"What we've learnt in the last 10 years has revolutionised the way we think about the brain and in the future we may be able to cure or treat the brain. Fifteen years ago, my group and a Canadian group discovered that the brains of adult animals had the ability to make new nerve cells," he says.
"It seemed that the idea that the number of neurons you were born with was all you were ever going to have and that it was all downhill from there was not going to be right and that has been proven to be true."
As we talk, he leads me by my lay person's hand through the labyrinth of the research that he is driving.
"The $64 million question is how important are these new nerve cells to memory and learning formation and we're now finding that the production of nerve cells might be very important to understanding dementia," he says.
"Most ageing dementia is a running down of the machinery's ability to make new neurons. The good news is that we are now starting to understand how we can activate neuron production.
"The other good news is that we have recently discovered in some unpublished data that the propensity to make new nerve cells in an old brain is still there.
"The hardware to make these new nerve cells is still sitting there but what is deficient is our ability to activate it."
Bartlett says the evidence indicates that if we activate these cells, we can overcome cognitive decline, and that physical exercise can regenerate nerve cells.
"Put an old animal on a running wheel and production of new nerve cells goes up more than twofold," he says.
As a consequence, the animals – mice – get smarter and regain the ability they had lost because of their age, to navigate their way through a challenge such as a maze to the point where their ability to react was almost back to juvenile levels.
"This is very exciting," Bartlett says. "We may be able to address this enormous problem of ageing dementia.
"Fifty per cent – maybe more – of the people in nursing homes are not there for physical problems. They're there because they can't find their way around or do simple tasks."
What he and his researchers are working on is how to activate new nerve cells and then keep them alive. "Keeping the brain in good shape through a combination of physical exercise and cognitive activity as basic as doing a cryptic crossword could be part of the key," he says.
Bartlett is confident that the institute's research will lead to the development of drugs that will, in his words, "rewire and regenerate the brain".
"The big three diseases of neuroscience are depression, dementia and stroke. They're bigger than cancer by a long way," he says.
"Could we, as part of this rewiring mechanism, cure things like stroke or effect a recovery?
"I think the answer is going to be 'yes'. The adult brain can regain the capabilities it had when it was young and developing, that's been the real revelation, that plasticity, that ability to regenerate.
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"Like a lot of myths about the brain, it was the idea that somehow the brain was protected from the immune system in general. There were some interesting experiments done in the old days, some really quite cavalier... bizarre, where people would transplant bits of tissue into various parts of the body and look to see whether they were rejected... People had transplanted tissue into the brain and saying it wasn't rejected... so it came to be that somehow the brain was an immune-privileged area and you could do anything you wanted in there... We discovered that wasn't true, but it's interesting how long some of these things carry on in science and aren't changed."- Perry in August 2007 ABC Brisbane Interview
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"That's what we're building this institute on – to understand how memory and learning works, which to me is the Holy Grail, and to drive our understanding into treating diseases that are really a scourge on our society."
Bartlett sees a day when old age will not lead to diminished mental acuity.
"I just turned 60 and I think there's great hope for old guys like us – I mean me," he says looking at me and grinning.
If they can repair the brain, can they do the same for the ego?
By Mike O'Connor
© Queensland Newspapers.
