The 2014 Lasker Award has just been won by Alim Louis Benabid, Director of Inserm Unit 318 “Preclinical Neurosciences” from 1988 to 2006, and winner of the 2008 Inserm Prix d’Honneur for his work on deep brain stimulation for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease.
A new ultrasound imaging technique has provided the first ever in vivo visualization of activity in the piriform cortex of rats during odor perception. This deep-seated brain structure plays an important role in olfaction, and was inaccessible to functional imaging until now. This work also sheds new light on the still poorly known functioning of the olfactory system, and notably how information is processed in the brain.
How many patients receive an incorrect diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease? The answer is a surprisingly high number: over a third! To reduce the number of errors, the diagnostic criteria must be the most reliable possible, especially at the very early stages of the disease. For the last decade, an international team of neurologists, coordinated by Bruno Dubois (Inserm/Pierre and Marie Curie University/AP-HP Joint Research Unit 975) has been working...
Neurons cannot properly defend themselves against Huntington’s disease, right from the onset of the pathology. This has been discovered by a team of Inserm researchers from the Paris-Seine Biology Institute (IBPS) (Inserm/CNRS/Pierre and Marie Curie University) and their American and Australian colleagues. The cause is the failure of an important mechanism involved in cellular longevity. In addition to this result, the present study shows the importance of restoring the...
Scientists from the Institut Pasteur, INSERM, Collège de France, and Pierre and Marie Curie University, in collaboration with a team from the University of Auvergne, identified mice models that mimic high-frequency hearing impairment in humans, with a strong low-frequency sound interference. Their work sheds light on the anomalies causing the hearing impairment and reveals cochlear defects that profoundly affect the way sound frequencies are processed. This work could explain...
Tout semble différencier une mouche d'un homme. Et pourtant, aussi étonnant que cela puisse paraitre, des chercheurs de l'Inserm dirigés par Christophe Bernard et Viktor Jirsa au sein de l’Institut de Neurosciences des Systèmes (INS) – Inserm U1106 à Marseille viennent de montrer que les crises d'épilepsie suivent des règles mathématiques simples et conservées à travers les espèces. La crise d’épilepsie est une forme d’activité neuronale qui est encodée...
A team of scientists led by Etienne Koechlin, Director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory (Inserm/ENS), has just decoded the reasoning process behind the human ability to adapt.
A study, carried out on mice, has just confirmed the neurobiological origin of attention - deficit disorder (ADD), a syndrome whose causes are poorly understood.
Researchers at Inserm and University of Lille 2/University of Lille Nord de France directed by David Blum, Inserm Research Fellow, have provided experimental evidence of the beneficial effects of caffeine in an animal model of Alzheimer’s disease. This work, carried out on mice and published in Neurobiology of Aging, supports the idea that caffeine has a protective effect in some brain pathologies.
The team led by Hélène Puccio, director of research for Inserm at the Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology (IGBMC) (Inserm / CNRS / University of Strasbourg) in close collaboration with Patrick Aubourg’s team (Inserm and Professor of Neuropaediatrics at Bicêtre Hospital) has demonstrated, in the mice, the efficacy of gene therapy for […]
