National Brain Institute To Open This Week At University of Florida

October 19, 1998

GAINESVILLE — Florida takes center stage into the chase for cures to today’s most devastating illnesses — especially brain and spinal cord problems — with this week’s opening of one of the nation’s most comprehensive and technologically advanced centers devoted to neuroscience.

About 250 University of Florida researchers from 50 academic departments, with collaborators at more than 75 universities and research institutes around the world, have pooled their talents to form the University of Florida Brain Institute.

Their expertise, combined with the latest scientific instrumentation and other resources, will enable UF Brain Institute researchers to achieve new levels of speed, precision, computational complexity, visual depth and detail in studying the brain and spine, said William Luttge, the institute’s founding director.

“With our campuswide, multidisciplinary team of scientists we will perform a wide range of fundamental studies in the laboratory — on spinal cord and brain injury, stroke, epilepsy, Alzheimer’s, brain tumors and other disabling and life-threatening problems — that we and others will then work to apply to the care of patients,” he said. “What I will be most proud of, in the long run, is seeing basic scientists working hand-in-hand with clinicians to conduct research that can make a real difference in people’s lives.”

A center that combines laboratory scientists with medical doctors is unique and should make for easier collaboration on problems, ideas and cures. It also will continue to enhance UF’s reputation, said Dr. Lorne M. Mendell, professor and chairman of the department of neurobiology and behavioral science at the State University of New York, Stony Brook.

“The University of Florida has amassed a group of researchers that has made a significant impact in a number of areas,” Mendell said. “The people at UF are known nationally and internationally.”

The UF Brain Institute building, open to the public from 3-7 p.m. Friday, features an imaging suite designed to accommodate five magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) spectrometers, each of which will be anchored in its own pod. Two of the world’s most powerful MRI systems — a 12-tesla magnet and a 17.6-tesla magnet — are scheduled to arrive next summer. The 12- tesla magnet will be shielded by more than 320,000 pounds of steel plates.

“The consortium of the UFBI’s imaging systems and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory provide imaging research capabilities that can’t be found anywhere else. The opportunities for VA scientists and patients to benefit from this are without precedent,” said Dr. Paul Hoffman, director of medical research at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

These new MRI systems will give scientists an unprecedented ability to study the structural biology of life — from molecules and single cells to living animals and even man. This facility will operate as an international resource with access eventually being available worldwide via the Internet.

The drive to build the $60 million brain institute began in 1990. U.S. Rep. C.W. Bill Young (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on National Security, was a primary catalyst behind the facility. It was at his urging that the U.S. Navy released, for competitive bidding, the $18 million his committee provided for construction. The University of Florida team won the bid, but the project couldn’t materialize until Young included another $20 million in the 1996 and 1997 defense appropriations bill for the project and its state-of-the-art magnets and computers. Additional money came from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the UF College of Medicine, Shands hospital at UF, private donors and the state of Florida.

“The University of Florida has amassed a world-renowned group of medical researchers and scientists to study brain and spinal cord injuries, and I am proud to have played a role in ensuring that they have a state-of-the-art facility in which to do their work,” Young said. “The Department of Defense is eager to use the results of the work done at the brain institute to help treat our men and women in uniform and to begin a cooperative program to teach military medical personnel in the field how to respond to battlefield injures in a way that will prevent or minimize brain and spinal cord injuries.”

Inside the new 210,000-square-foot building, a galaxy of advanced machines will aid scientists in exploring all aspects of the nervous system:

• A buildingwide high-speed network enables faculty to conduct simultaneous teaching or research demonstrations and collaborations using interactive computers.
• In the neurosurgical training laboratory, a teacher can project brain dissections from high-resolution cameras and microscopes, and from X-ray, endoscopic and other imaging equipment onto multiple computer screens and transmit it live to other teaching locations and even to faculty offices in the building.
• From their offices in the institute, physicians also can order brain scans of patients in Shands at UF to be transmitted and projected onto their office computers. In the near future, these physicians also will be able to use their office computers to view, including “through the microscope,” what is going on in the Shands at UF neurosurgical operating rooms.
• To help answer the challenge of the rapidly growing interest in developing gene and cell replacement therapy as a means of treating human diseases and injuries, the new building has two “clean room” facilities in which to produce these novel human therapeutic agents.
• In addition to the MRI instrumentation, a variety of other exotic imaging systems, many based on the use of lasers, enable brain institute scientists to see immediate reactions that occur inside cells of the brain, eye or spinal cord in response to stimuli such as by hormones or drugs.
• A growing number of corporate partnerships also are being established to help brain institute faculty and students work on the application of their research to real-world problems and to gain access to an even wider array of expensive instrumentation. One prominent example of the latter is a 6-million-electron-volt, computer-controlled linear accelerator for radiobiological and surgical research.

“The campuswide pool of faculty talent, along with the state-of-the-art instrumentation and other facilities within the new building, plus the federal, state, corporate, private and other forms of program support, should act synergistically to speed progress in the fundamental biomedical neurosciences as well as in their application to neurological disorders and injuries,” said Luttge. “And, aided by a second stage of construction and renovation to expand neuro-clinical space at Shands, the institute will become a leading site for training military surgeons and other health-care professionals.”