#Extracting audio from visual information Algorithm recovers speech from the vibrations of a potato-chip bag filmed through soundproof glass.
Researchers at MIT, Microsoft, and Adobe have developed an algorithm that can reconstruct an audio signal by analyzing minute vibrations of objects depicted in video.
In one set of experiments, they were able to recover intelligible speech from the vibrations of a potato-chip bag photographed from 15 feet away through soundproof Glass in other experiments,
they extracted useful audio signals from videos of aluminum foil, the surface of a glass of water,
and even the leaves of a potted plant. The researchers will present their findings in a paper at this year Siggraph
a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and first author on the new paper. he motion of this vibration creates a very subtle visual signal that usually invisible to the naked eye.
Joining Davis on the Siggraph paper are Frédo Durand and Bill Freeman, both MIT professors of computer science and engineering;
Neal Wadhwa, a graduate student in Freeman group; Michael Rubinstein of Microsoft Research, who did his Phd with Freeman;
and Gautham Mysore of Adobe Research. Reconstructing audio from video requires that the frequency of the video samples the number of frames of video captured per second be higher than the frequency of the audio signal.
In some of their experiments, the researchers used a high-speed camera that captured 2, 000 to 6, 000 frames per second.
That much faster than the 60 frames per second possible with some smartphones, but well below the frame rates of the best commercial high-speed cameras,
Commodity hardware In other experiments however, they used an ordinary digital camera. Because of a quirk in the design of most camerassensors, the researchers were able to infer information about high-frequency vibrations even from video recorded at a standard 60 frames per second.
In ongoing work, the researchers have begun trying to determine material and structural properties of objects from their visible response to short bursts of sound.
That corresponds to five thousandths of a pixel in a close up image, but from the change of a single pixel color value over time,
it possible to infer motions smaller than a pixel. Suppose, for instance, that an image has a clear boundary between two regions:
Everything on one side of the boundary is blue; everything on the other is red.
But at the boundary itself, the camera sensor receives both red and blue light, so it averages them out to produce purple.
If, over successive frames of video, the blue region encroaches into the red region even less than the width of a pixel the purple will grow slightly bluer.
Putting it together Some boundaries in an image are fuzzier than a single pixel in width, however.
So the researchers borrowed a technique from earlier work on algorithms that amplify minuscule variations in video
the breathing of an infant in the neonatal ward of a hospital, or the pulse in a subject wrist.
That technique passes successive frames of video through a battery of image filters, which are used to measure fluctuations,
The researchers developed an algorithm that combines the output of the filters to infer the motions of an object as a whole
so the algorithm first aligns all the measurements so that they won cancel each other out. And it gives greater weight to measurements made at very distinct edges clear boundaries between different color values.
The researchers also produced a variation on the algorithm for analyzing conventional video. The sensor of a digital camera consists of an array of photodetectors millions of them, even in commodity devices.
As it turns out, it less expensive to design the sensor hardware so that it reads off the measurements of one row of photodetectors at a time.
Ordinarily, that not a problem but with fast-moving objects, it can lead to odd visual artifacts.
the rotor of a helicopter may actually move detectably between the reading of one row and the reading of the next.
says Alexei Efros, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California at Berkeley. ee scientists,
The work might enable new kinds of biomedical or microfluidic devices or solar panels that could automatically clean themselves of dust and grit.
Most surfaces are passive says Kripa Varanasi an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT and senior author of a paper describing the new system in the journal Applied Physics Letters.
They rely on gravity or other forces to move fluids or particles. Varanasi s team decided to use external fields such as magnetic fields to make surfaces active exerting precise control over the behavior of particles
or droplets moving over them. The system makes use of a microtextured surface with bumps
and pulled by applying a magnetic field to the surface. When droplets of water or tiny particles are placed on the surface a thin coating of the fluid covers them forming a magnetic cloak.
Tiny ferromagnetic particles approximately 10 nanometers in diameter in the ferrofluid could allow precision control
when it s needed such as in a microfluidic device used to test biological or chemical samples by mixing them with a variety of reagents.
or fluids these require the material being moved to be magnetic and very strong magnetic fields to move them around.
This allows us to attain high velocities with small applied forces says MIT graduate student Karim Khalil the paper s lead author.
For example solar panels and the mirrors used in solar-concentrating systems can quickly lose a significant percentage of their efficiency
The data shows a loss of almost 1 percent of efficiency per week. But at present even in desert locations the only way to counter this fouling is to hose the arrays down a labor-and water-intensive method.
In the desert environment dust is present on a daily basis says co-author Numan Abu-Dheir of the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM) in Saudi arabia.
The issue of dust basically makes the use of solar panels to be less efficient than in North america or Europe.
We need a way to reduce the dust accumulation. Watch a water droplet get pulled across an active surface designed by MIT researchers.
MIT postdoc Seyed Mahmoudi a co-author of the paper notes that electric fields cannot penetrate into conductive fluids such as biological fluids so conventional systems wouldn t be able to manipulate them.
But with this system he says electrical conductivity is not important. In addition this approach gives a great deal of control over how material moves.
While this initial demonstration used a magnetic fluid the team says the same principle could be applied using other forces to manipulate the material such as electric fields or differences in temperature.
Neelesh Patankar a professor of mechanical engineering at Northwestern University who was involved not in this work says this research introduces a new class of approach for droplet-based microfluidic platforms
which have numerous applications in a variety of fields including biotechnology. He adds This work cleverly combines low-hysteresis droplet movement with low-magnetic-field-driven droplet propulsion to achieve impressive capabilities.
The work was supported by the MIT-KFUPM Center for Clean water and Clean energy y
#Light pulses control graphene s electrical behavior Graphene, an ultrathin form of carbon with exceptional electrical optical and mechanical properties, has become a focus of research on a variety of potential uses.
Now researchers at MIT have found a way to control how the material conducts electricity by using extremely short light pulses
which could enable its use as a broadband light detector. The new findings are published in the journal Physical Review Letters in a paper by graduate student Alex Frenzel Nuh Gedik and three others.
The researchers found that by controlling the concentration of electrons in a graphene sheet they could change the way the material responds to a short but intense light pulse.
If the graphene sheet starts out with low electron concentration the pulse increases the material s electrical conductivity.
This behavior is similar to that of traditional semiconductors such as silicon and germanium. But if the graphene starts out with high electron concentration the pulse decreases its conductivity the same way that a metal usually behaves.
Therefore by modulating graphene's electron concentration the researchers found that they could effectively alter graphene's photoconductive properties from semiconductorlike to metallike.
and the bottom electrode the electron concentration of graphene could be tuned. The researchers then illuminated graphene with a strong light pulse and measured the change of electrical conduction by assessing the transmission of a second low-frequency light pulse.
In this case the laser performs dual functions. We use two different light pulses: one to modify the material and one to measure the electrical conduction.
Gedik says that the pulses used to measure the conduction are much lower frequency than the pulses used to modify the material behavior.
Gedik the Lawrence C. and Sarah W. Biedenharn Associate professor of Physics says the measurement method that Frenzel implemented is a cool technique.
Our experiment reveals that the cause of photoconductivity in graphene is very different from that in a normal metal or semiconductors,
The researchers say the work could aid the development of new light detectors with ultrafast response times and high sensitivity across a wide range of light frequencies from the infrared to ultraviolet.
Practical application of such a detector would therefore require increasing absorption efficiency such as by using multiple layers of graphene,
Isabella Gierz a professor at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter in Hamburg Germany who was involved not in this research says:"
"The work is interesting because it presents a systematic study of the doping dependence of the low energy dynamics
The research team also included Jing Kong the ITT Career development Associate professor of Electrical engineering at MIT who provided the graphene samples used for the experiments;
and Yong Cheol Shin a graduate student in materials science and engineering. The work received support from the U s. Department of energy and the National Science Foundation n
#Vision-correcting displays Researchers at the MIT Media Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley have developed a new display technology that automatically corrects for vision defects no glasses (or contact lenses) required.
The technique could lead to dashboard-mounted GPS displays that farsighted drivers can consult without putting their glasses on
or electronic readers that eliminate the need for reading glasses among other applications. The first spectacles were invented in the 13th century says Gordon Wetzstein a research scientist at the Media Lab and one of the display's co-creators.
Today of course we have contact lenses and surgery but it's all invasive in the sense that you
either have to put something in your eye wear something on your head or undergo surgery.
We have a different solution that basically puts the glasses on the display rather than on your head.
It will not be able to help you see the rest of the world more sharply
but today we spend a huge portion of our time interacting with the digital world.
Wetzstein and his colleagues describe their display in a paper they're presenting in August at Siggraph the premier graphics conference.
Joining him on the paper are Ramesh Raskar the NEC Career development Professor of Media Arts and Sciences and director of the Media Lab s Camera Culture group and Berkeley s Fu-Chung
The display is a variation on a glasses-free 3-D technology also developed by the Camera Culture group.
and right eyes the vision-correcting display projects slightly different images to different parts of the viewer's pupil.
Essentially the new display simulates an image at the correct focal distance somewhere between the display and the viewer's eye.
The difficulty with this approach is that simulating a single pixel in the virtual image requires multiple pixels of the physical display.
which light would arrive from the same image displayed on the screen. So the physical pixels projecting light to the right side of the pupil have to be offset to the left
and the pixels projecting light to the left side of the pupil have to be offset to the right.
The use of multiple on-screen pixels to simulate a single virtual pixel would drastically reduce the image resolution.
But this problem turns out to be very similar to a problem that Wetzstein Raskar and colleagues solved in their 3-D displays
which also had to project different images at different angles. The researchers discovered that there is in fact a great deal of redundancy between the images required to simulate different viewing angles.
The algorithm that computes the image to be displayed onscreen can exploit that redundancy allowing individual screen pixels to participate simultaneously in the projection of different viewing angles.
The MIT and Berkeley researchers were able to adapt that algorithm to the problem of vision correction so the new display incurs only a modest loss in resolution.
In the researchers prototype however display pixels do have to be masked from the parts of the pupil for which they re not intended.
That requires that a transparency patterned with an array of pinholes be laid over the screen blocking more than half the light it emits.
Multitasking But early versions of the 3-D display faced the same problem and the MIT researchers solved it by
instead using two liquid-crystal displays (LCDS) in parallel. Carefully tailoring the images displayed on the LCDS to each other allows the system to mask perspectives
while letting much more light pass through. Wetzstein envisions that commercial versions of a vision-correcting screen would use the same technique.
Indeed he says the same screens could both display 3-D content and correct for vision defects all glasses-free.
They could also reproduce another Camera Culture project which diagnoses vision defects. So the same device could in effect determine the user s prescription
and automatically correct for it. Most people in mainstream optics would have said Oh this is impossible
says Chris Dainty a professor at the University college London Institute of Ophthalmology and Moorfields Eye Hospital.
MIT researchers explain how their vision-correcting display technology works. The key thing is they seem to have cracked the contrast problem Dainty adds.
Dainty believes that the most intriguing application of the technology is in dashboard displays. Most people over 50 55 quite probably see in the distance fine
In the car you can wear varifocals but varifocals distort the geometry of the outside world
whose advanced emotion-tracking software called Affdex is based on years of MIT Media Lab research.
Today the startup is attracting some big-name clients including Kellogg and Unilever. Backed by more than $20 million in funding the startup
which has amassed a vast facial-expression database is also setting its sights on a mood-aware Internet that reads a user s emotions to shape content.
This could lead for example to more relevant online ads as well as enhanced gaming and online learning experiences.
The broad goal is to become the emotion layer of the Internet says Affectiva cofounder Rana el Kaliouby a former MIT postdoc who invented the technology.
We believe there s an opportunity to sit between any human-to-computer or human-to-human interaction point capture data
and use it to enrich the user experience. In using Affdex Affectiva recruits participants to watch advertisements in front of their computer webcams tablets and smartphones.
Machine learning algorithms track facial cues focusing prominently on the eyes eyebrows and mouth. A smile for instance would mean the corners of the lips curl upward and outward teeth flash and the skin around their eyes wrinkles.
Affdex then infers the viewer s emotions such as enjoyment surprise anger disgust or confusion and pushes the data to a cloud server where Affdex aggregates the results from all the facial videos (sometimes hundreds)
which it publishes on a dashboard. But determining whether a person likes or dislikes an advertisement takes advanced analytics.
Importantly the software looks for hooking the viewers in the first third of an advertisement by noting increased attention
and focus signaled in part by less fidgeting and fixated gazes. Smiles can indicate that a commercial designed to be humorous is indeed funny.
But if a smirk subtle asymmetric lip curls separate from smiles comes at a moment when information appears on the screen it may indicate skepticism or doubt.
Still in their early stages some of the apps are designed for entertainment such as people submitting selfies to analyze their moods and sharing them across social media.
Still others could help children with autism better interact el Kaliouby says such as games that make people match facial cues with emotions.
This would focus on pragmatic training helping these kids understand the meaning of different facial expressions and how to express their own she says.
Years of data-gathering have trained the algorithms to be very discerning. As a Phd student at Cambridge university in the early 2000s el Kaliouby began developing facial-coding software.
She was inspired in part by her future collaborator and Affectiva cofounder Rosalind Picard an MIT professor who pioneered the field of affective computing where machines can recognize interpret process
and simulate human affects. Back then the data that el Kaliouby had consisted access to of about 100 facial expressions gathered from photos
and those 100 expressions were fairly prototypical. To recognize surprise for example we had this humongous surprise expression.
if you showed the computer an expression of a person that s somewhat surprised or subtly shocked it wouldn t recognize it el Kaliouby says.
In 2006 el Kaliouby came to the Media Lab to work with Picard to expand
Together they quickly started applying the facial-coding technology to autism research and training the algorithms by collecting vast stores of data.
Coming from a traditional research background the Media Lab was completely different el Kaliouby says.
and provide real-time feedback to the wearer via a Bluetooth headset. For instance auditory cues would provide feedback such as This person is bored
-and with a big push by Frank Moss then the Media Lab s director they soon ditched the wearable prototype to build a cloud-based version of the software founding Affectiva in 2009.
Kaliouby says training its software s algorithms to discern expressions from all different face types and skin colors.
and can avoid tracking any other movement on screen. One of Affectiva s long-term goals is to usher in a mood-aware Internet to improve users experiences.
Imagine an Internet that s like walking into a large outlet store with sales representatives el Kaliouby says.
At the store the salespeople are reading your physical cues in real time and assessing whether to approach you
Websites and connected devices of the future should be like this very mood-aware. Sometime in the future this could mean computer games that adapt in difficulty and other game variables based on user reaction.
But more immediately it could work for online learning. Already Affectiva has conducted pilot work for online learning where it captured data on facial engagement to predict learning outcomes.
For this the software indicates for instance if a student is bored frustrated or focused which is especially valuable for prerecorded lectures el Kaliouby says.
To be able to capture that data in real time means educators can adapt that learning experience
and change the content to better engage students making it say more or less difficult and change feedback to maximize learning outcomes el Kaliouby says.
That s one application we re really excited about t
#Making the cut Diode lasers used in laser pointers barcode scanners DVD players and other low-power applications are perhaps the most efficient compact and low-cost lasers available.
Attempts have been made over the years to amplify the brightness of these valuable lasers for industrial applications such as welding and cutting metal.
But boosting power usually means decreasing beam quality or focus. And the beam never gets intense enough to melt metal.
Now MIT Lincoln Laboratory spinout Teradiode is commercializing a multikilowatt diode laser system that s bright enough to cut
and weld even through a half-inch of steel at greater efficiencies than today s industrial lasers.
The 4-kilowatt Terablade runs on a novel power-scaling technique developed at MIT that manipulates individual diode laser beams into a single output ray.
and fiber says Teradiode cofounder and vice president Robin Huang a former Lincoln Laboratory researcher and Terablade co-inventor.
which electricity runs through a gas to produce light. These are very bright but can be as large as trucks
and operate at about 20 percent efficiency. Then came diode-pumped solid-state (DPSS) lasers including disk
and fiber that first transfer energy from diode lasers into a medium usually a crystal before converting it into a laser beam.
These operate only up to about 30 percent efficiency. But the Terablade aptly called a direct-diode laser uses light directly from the diodes skipping the DPSS conversion step
and saving energy Huang says. This means the Terablade operates with just as much power and brightness as all other industrial lasers about 2600 megawatts per square centimeter per steradian at roughly 40 percent efficiency.
At the core of the Terablade is a power-scaling technique known as wavelength beam combining (WBC
or incoherent beam combining developed by Huang and former Lincoln Laboratory researcher and Teradiode cofounder Bien Chann who is now the company s vice president and chief technology officer.
a 3-foot cube that comes with multiple laser engines a control computer power supplies and an output head for welding
and Germany where energy costs are high Huang says. In April the company began shipping its system to Panasonic Welding Systems in Europe and Japan.
It fires infrared laser light at the missile which would confuse the missile s programming and cause it to lose its target.
The laser s compact design would allow it to be mounted on a fighter jet. With the Terablade technology Huang says The sky is the limit literally y
#$650 million commitment to Stanley Center at Broad Institute aims to galvanize mental illness research The following is adapted from a press release issued today by the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
The Broad Institute today announced an unprecedented commitment of $650 million from philanthropist Ted Stanley aimed at galvanizing scientific research on psychiatric disorders and bringing new treatments based on molecular understanding to hundreds
of millions of people around the world. The Stanley commitment the largest ever in psychiatric research and among the largest for scientific research in general will support research by a collaborative network of researchers within the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute a biomedical research institution
that brings together faculty from MIT Harvard university Harvard-affiliated hospitals and collaborators worldwide. Stanley s commitment to support the work of the Broad Institute will consist of annual gifts during his lifetime followed by a bequest with a total current value exceeding $650 million.
Taking prior gifts into account Stanley s philanthropy in support of the Broad Institute s work totals more than $825 million.
The Stanley commitment is an extraordinary opportunity for MIT scientists and the larger Broad Institute research community MIT President L. Rafael Reif says.
I join the Broad Institute in expressing my gratitude to Ted Stanley. The biological causes of mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder have mystified scientists for decades;
in the last five years however understanding has accelerated dramatically driven by advances in human genomics.
Because researchers cannot study the biochemistry of the living human brain the genes that predispose people to schizophrenia
and bipolar disorder represent the best way to gain molecular insights into these disorders. The discovery of specific genes associated with these disorders provides significant clues to their biological basis and points to possible molecular targets for novel therapies.
Since 2004 Ted Stanley and his late wife Vada Stanley have been instrumental to the progress made thus far in identifying the genetic risk factors for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and the initiation of therapeutic efforts based on those discoveries.
Their gifts made possible the establishment of the Stanley Center at the Broad Institute in 2007
Stanley s new commitment is the culmination of a 25-year personal mission to discover the biology of psychiatric disorders
and lay the groundwork for effective therapies. Human genomics has begun to reveal the causes of these disorders.
It s now time to step on the gas pedal Stanley says. I am devoting my personal wealth to this goal.
But it will take all of us philanthropists government funding agencies scientists patients and families working together to achieve it.
Years of frustration give way to progressmental illness exacts an enormous human toll. The leading cause of disability in the United states it affects millions
and most often strikes patients while they are young and otherwise healthy. Biomedical researchers have struggled for years to understand the molecular causes of serious ailments such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
Until five years ago there was no clear scientific evidence around even a single gene that contributes to causing either disorder.
Research to develop new treatments has stalled also. No fundamentally new drugs have been introduced since the 1950s.
Yet in the past few years scientists have begun to find genes that shape the risk of schizophrenia bipolar disorder and other illnesses thanks in large part to Stanley s support.
and assembled the world s largest collection of DNA samples in psychiatric research currently more than 175000 samples including schizophrenia bipolar disorder autism attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and healthy control samples.
Analysis of 80000 of these samples so far by Broad researchers and collaborators has linked more than 100 genomic regions to schizophrenia
and begun to identify specific gene mutations and the critical underlying biological processes such as an impaired ability of neurons to communicate with each other.
Significant efforts are ramping up in bipolar disorder autism and other conditions. We are going to illuminate the biology behind these conditions says Eric Lander founding director and president of the Broad Institute and a professor of biology at MIT.
If we know the biological causes we can begin to dispel the stigma around people battling mental illness
and rigorously pursue better treatments that will transform patients lives. Three lives converge on a shared scientific missionthis scientific success
and the historic commitment of funding announced today stems in large part from the devotion of three extraordinary people
when his son Jonathan was stricken with severe bipolar disorder while in college. The first few years were difficult
but Jonathan overcame his illness with the help of lithium a landmark drug first used to treat patients with mental illness in 1949.
Now a successful attorney Jonathan is also a founding board member of the Treatment Advocacy Center a nonprofit organization dedicated to reforming laws that affect persons with a mental illness and an advocate for the National Alliance on Mental illness.
Although lithium helped give Jonathan a normal life other patients who suffer from mental illness have not been as fortunate.
When Edward Scolnick met the Stanleys he had had a stellar career first in cancer research in the 1970s and then as one of the most respected scientists in the pharmaceutical industry.
As president of Merck Research Laboratories Scolnick led the development of the first drugs to effectively combat HIV;
the first vaccine against cervical cancer; and many other breakthroughs. Instead of retiring Scolnick took on a new challenge:
He moved to the Broad Institute to tackle mental illness because he had a deep personal interest in the field.
Early in his career Scolnick had helped launch a revolution in cancer research based on the discovery of the first cancer genes.
He wanted to set psychiatric research on the same path. Scolnick vividly remembers the moment he and the Stanleys joined forces.
If you want to get at the molecular pathogenesis of these disorders you ve got to crack the genetics.
The Stanleys had given many small grants to support psychiatric research through their foundation but Scolnick argued for the importance of critical mass
Thus the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad was launched in 2007 with Scolnick as its founding director.
Before taking that post Hyman a psychiatrist had served as head of NIMH from 1996 to 2001.
Scolnick served as a member of Hyman s National Advisory Mental health Council from 1998 to 2002
and Lander served as a member of the NIMH s Genetics Workgroup; the three had developed a mutual respect and a shared vision for
and genetics and along with Scolnick and Lander supported the collection of DNA samples from patients with the hope that the samples could someday be analyzed to find disease genes.
because the Human genome Project had not yet been completed. When Hyman left the NIMH in 2001 to become provost of Harvard he had lost almost completely hope that true progress could be made in his lifetime in elucidating the mechanisms of psychiatric illness.
Hyman helped launch the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in 2004 and over time became encouraged by the Broad s progress in the molecular understanding of psychiatric disorders.
After nine years as Harvard provost he joined the Broad and then became the director of the Stanley Center in 2012.
Ten years ago finding the biological causes of psychiatric disorders was like trying to climb a wall with no footholds says Hyman who Is distinguished also the Service Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard.
If this is a wall we ve put toeholds into it. Now we have to start climbing.
The Broad Institute grew from an MIT-based flagship center for the Human Genome Project
and generated one-third of the DNA sequence data for that project the single largest contribution to the effort.
Formally founded in 2004 to fulfill the promise of the Human genome Project by facilitating collaborative biomedical research across disciplines
and institutions it brings together faculty from MIT Harvard and the five major Harvard-affiliated hospitals:
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical center Boston Children s Hospital Brigham and Women s Hospital Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital.
Celebrating its 10th anniversary this month the Broad Institute is today home to a community of more than 2000 members including physicians biologists chemists computer scientists engineers staff and representatives of many other disciplines.
Broad investigators have led international consortia that have found thousands of genetic variants responsible for common diseases such as diabetes heart disease
and Crohn s disease and translated that knowledge into descriptions of the underlying biological processes a critical step in the development of rationally designed drugs.
They have discovered several hundred genes that are mutated in cancer and applied this knowledge to begin to invent new targeted forms of therapy.
Broad scientists have invented also powerful new tools that allow researchers to precisely manipulate the genome and measure the millions of complex chemical interactions within cells.
In the spirit of the Human genome Project the Broad makes its genomic data freely available to researchers around the world.
The future of psychiatric research The Stanley Center engages a community of more than 150 scientists at the Broad Institute and its partner institutions.
Over the coming years the center plans to draw on Stanley s tremendous generosity to accomplish at least four major goals:
Complete the list of all genes that play roles in severe psychiatric disorders including schizophrenia bipolar disorder autism and others.
To create a comprehensive catalog of the genetic variation that underlies mental illness the researchers plan to expand their international network
They also plan to expand their sample collection efforts dramatically especially among understudied populations such as those in African nations to reveal the many as-yet-undiscovered mutations relevant to disease.
As a first step they plan to carry out comprehensive analysis of all genes that specify the protein building blocks of cells from 100000 samples in the next two years.
Reveal the biological pathways in which these genes act. To do so they will push technological boundaries working with new techniques that allow them to manipulate
when and how these genes act in human brain cells and how in psychiatric patients those processes may go awry.
In contrast to researchers studying cancer or diabetes researchers studying psychiatric disorders have been unable to identify animal models that correctly capture important biological aspects of the disorders
and correctly predict which therapies will be effective in humans. Now with growing knowledge of the genes underlying psychiatric disorders Broad researchers plan to create cellular models in the laboratory
and animal models that more faithfully match both the genetic variation and the biochemical processes seen in human patients.
They plan to pioneer cutting-edge techniques such as genome editing which allows them to precisely introduce any mutations they choose.
Develop chemicals to modulate biological pathways to serve as drug leads. The researchers plan to build on the existing therapeutic efforts within the Stanley Center
and draw on the Broad s Therapeutics Platform a technological powerhouse with the capacity to create
and screen hundreds of thousands of compounds to identify molecules that can powerfully and precisely influence specific biological pathways relevant to psychiatric disorders.
They then plan to comprehensively investigate those chemicals effects to determine which of them might serve as promising leads for drugs that could be safely
and effectively used in humans. We re still at the beginning of the curve of translating the emerging genetics into actionable biology
but it s happening much faster than I thought it would Scolnick says. I d be bold enough to say that in five years all the drug companies that got out of psychiatric research will be getting back in.
The coming decades of psychiatric research will yield new science and a needed parallel effort to increase resources for services that can help patients and their families.
About the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research The mission of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute is to reduce the burden of serious mental illness through research.
Stanley Center researchers focus on schizophrenia bipolar disorder autism attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and other neuropsychiatric disorders.
Situated within the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard the Stanley Center aims to exploit the most advanced technologies for human genetic analysis to study these psychiatric disorders
in order to understand disease mechanisms identify potential biomarkers and ignite needed progress in therapeutics. Launched in 2007 by a $100 million commitment from the Stanley Medical Research Institute the Stanley Center has extensive collaborations with investigators at MIT Harvard and the Harvard-affiliated hospitals as well as with investigators around the world.
About the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvardthe Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard was launched in 2004 to empower this generation of creative scientists to transform medicine.
The Broad Institute seeks to describe all the molecular components of life and their connections; discover the molecular basis of major human diseases;
develop effective new approaches to diagnostics and therapeutics; and disseminate discoveries tools methods and data openly to the entire scientific community.
Founded by MIT Harvard and its affiliated hospitals and the visionary Los angeles philanthropists Eli and Edythe L. Broad the Broad Institute includes faculty professional staff
and students from throughout the MIT and Harvard biomedical research communities and beyond with collaborations spanning more than 100 private and public institutions in more than 40 countries worldwide e
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