SAN ANTONIO - The University of Texas at San Antonio received a $5.2 million federal grant to use its best brains to study the brain.
The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke chose UTSA through a special long-term funding program called the Outstanding Investigator Award.
Dr. Charles Wilson said he’s excited about his daunting and overwhelming job. At his UTSA lab, he’s mapping the brain, how it reacts and searching for the keys to stop degenerative disorders like Parkinson’s and Huntington’s.
“We are trying to figure out where that pattern of activity comes from or causes it, and how we can disrupt it or block it in order to make better treatments for Parkinson's disease,” Wilson said.
The common treatment for this type of disease is deep brain stimulation. The $5.2 million grant will allow Wilson to dig deeper for eight more years.
“Deep brain stimulation is actually electrodes implanted into the brain that stimulates on a regular basis, like a heart pacemaker, only in the brain,” Wilson said.
The federal grant will allow researchers to focus on the region of the brain that involves voluntary motor skills.
“We can suggest improvements as to how deep brain stimulation can be made better. We have collaborators who are actually using those methods and trying them out, and we can create better and better deep brain stimulations. That's what we are trying to do,” Wilson.
Current patients will benefit, no doubt, but their children who inherit disease will too.
http://www.ksat.com/news/utsa-receives-52-million-grant-to-study-degenerative-disorders
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