Batch also donated Rs 50 lakh for merit and fund scholarships at IIT Madras
The Class of 1972 at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) sponsored the establishment of the “Parkinson’s Therapy Laboratory” at the Institute to advance efforts to cure Parkinson’s disease.
The batch has also donated Rs 50 lakh to the IIT Madras scholarship fund. Both initiatives were to mark the occasion of their gathering on the occasion of the Golden Jubilee.
This lab will be a major push for researchers in the Institute’s Biotechnology Division’s Computational Neuroscience Laboratory (CNS Lab) to develop a computational model of a brain region called the “basal ganglia” (BG) where cell loss leads to Parkinson’s disease .
The BG system plays vital and diverse roles in all major areas of brain function such as sensory-motor, cognitive, affective, and autonomic.
The CNS Lab is involved in the development of systems-level models of various vital brain systems. The ultimate goal of the CNS Lab is to create a whole brain model and use it to develop model-based therapy for Parkinson’s disease (PD) and other brain disorders.
Thanking the batch of 1972 for their contribution to a cause of immense benefit to society, Prof. Mahesh Panchagnula, Dean (Alumni and Corporate Relations), IIT Madras, said, “We acknowledge this contribution with a deep sense of gratitude. The funding will support innovative translational research into a debilitating disease.
Research on Parkinson’s disease in the CNS Lab includes
➢ Basal ganglia research and Parkinson’s disease
➢ Model-based clinical applications for Parkinson’s disease
1. Simulators for the action of drugs for Parkinson’s disease such as “LDopa”
2. Deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s disease
3. Quantitative diagnostic system for Parkinson’s disease
Lauding the cutting-edge research being conducted at IIT Madras, batch of 1972 alumnus KK Raman, batch coordinator, said, “As many as 146 alumni and spouses attended the Golden Reunion of the batch of 1972. Following the sentence ‘Government meets the needs, Alumni meet the aspirations of IITM’, the class of 1972 supported the Parkinson’s Therapeutics Laboratory at the Institute for Futuristic Studies to contribute to Indian research capacity.
The project will be led by Prof. V. Srinivasa Chakravarthy, Faculty, Department of Biotechnology, IIT Madras, who heads the Computational Neuroscience Lab (CNS Lab) at Bhupat and Jyoti Mehta School of Biosciences, Department of Biotechnology, IIT Madras.
Explaining some of the key aspects of their research, Prof Chakravarthy said: “Researchers have proposed different computational models for different functions of the basal ganglia, but there is no consensus between the models. Making an important departure from the classical, textbook description of the functional anatomy of the BG, the CNS Lab was able to model a wide range of motor functions and some cognitive functions of the BG. These results have been developed in 36 journal publications, three book chapters, one of which is an invited contribution to the Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience, and a book titled “Computational Neuroscience Models of the Basal Ganglia,” published by Springer.
Prof. Chakravarthy further added, “Currently, worldwide efforts are underway to develop large-scale drug action simulators to understand the relationship between drug action and symptom relief. The emerging field of computational neuropharmacology deals with large multiscale models that link drug action and symptoms. Big pharmaceutical companies invest in creating such simulators because they can save costs and time and minimize the role of expensive animals and clinical trials in the validation of a drug molecule.
CNS Lab developed and published one such simulator to relate LDOPA dose and ON/OFF periods of a PD patient. A national patent has been filed for this design with plans to file internationally. The researchers plan to develop such models for other classes of PD drugs such as dopamine agonists or MAO inhibitors.
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