Culture Editor Thomas Deakin documents the research initiative being led by King’s College London (KCL) along with other universities into previously undocumented areas of brain development.
Along with University College London (UCL) and the University of Manchester, KCL is forming the Medical Research Council (MRC) Centre of Research Excellence (CoRE) for Human Neural Development. This newly founded centre will utilise the collaborative research between these universities to explore brain growth and development.
In particular, the centre aims to examine the prenatal period and early brain development up to early childhood. The research of the centre intends to identify how disruptions to this process can be combated with new forms of treatment.
Led by Professor Oscar Marin, a Professor of Neuroscience at KCL, the centre endeavours to monitor brain development more carefully and healthily through recent technological breakthroughs. These include: brain scans of both prenatal and postnatal development; modelling of brain tissue; and the use of artificial intelligence as a means of studying health and positing potential ways to improve it.
It is hoped that this research can improve clinical treatments by focussing on the development of the cerebral cortex, which is the human origin of language and creativity.
The key language centres in the cerebral cortex include Wernicke’s area, which is the area of the brain that involves language comprehension and enables speech sounds to be understood by the brain. Furthermore, the cerebral cortex also contains Broca’s area, which is equally important as the area in the brain where speech is produced and thus projected from the human body.
The influence on the MRC CoRE’s by recent technologies also means it has access to new technologies for brain developmental analysis. The centre will collaborate with King’s recently established Brain Organoids Laboratory, funded by a £1.5m grant from the Wolfson Foundation in 2024.
Through this collaboration, they can construct human models of brain tissue using organoid technologies to understand the contrast between normalised human brain development and brains that have neurodevelopment disorders. The centre intends to discover these differences in genealogical makeup to initiate treatment for those with such disorders.
This life-saving research will be achieved through the fusion of many different academics and scientists in different primary fields.
The centre’s translational lead and Deputy director, the University of Manchester’s Shruti Garg, will interact with local NHS clinical networks in Manchester to study prenatal and postnatal brain development.
Furthermore, UCL’s Professor in Physics and Biomedical Engineering Ilias Tachtsidis will lead the engineering side of research through technology focussing on specific areas of brain biology.
Lastly, KCL’s Professor of Developmental Translational Neuroscience Emily Jones will connect evidence of healthy brain development to how brain development turns out post infancy at South London’s Pears Maudsley Centre for Children and Young People, recently opened with funding from KCL.
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