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Neuroscientists shed light on how past experiences subconsciously influence behavior Cambridge, Ma – Researchers at MIT’s Picower Institute for…

Nature’s neuroscience podcast reporter Kerri Smith interviews via telephone George Dragoi regarding the research paper, “Preplay of future place cell sequences by hippocampal cellular assemblies,” by George Dragoi and Susumu Tonegawa, which appeared in the Jan. 20, 2011 issue of Nature. (The interview begins at 12:11)

Outside of certain circles at MIT, you’d be hard pressed to find someone who is familiar with the biotech startup Galenea. The Cambridge, MA-based firm has been researching drugs for schizophrenia and other neurological disorders for more than five years, yet it has done so with a unique funding strategy that has kept its significant operation under the radar.

Galenea, founded in 2003 by MIT professor and Nobel laureate Susumu Tonegawa and others, has received the majority of its funding from the Japanese drug maker Otsuka Pharmaceutical, Mark Benjamin, the firm’s CEO, said. The startup has never raised a round of venture capital. And the company’s founders, employees, and Otsuka own the company.

Otsuka Pharmaceutical, a unit of Otsuka Holdings, began collaborating with Galenea in January 2005 and will have pumped $90 million into the startup’s research by the end of 2011. A focus of the collaboration has been on a defective protein, studied in Tonegawa’s lab at MIT and at Rockefeller University, which is believed to play a role in schizophrenia and other neurological dysfunctions. The aim is to find drugs that can modify the activity of the protein enough to treat a variety of mental disorders…

By examining how we learn and store memories, Australian and American scientists have uncovered a new mechanism of learning that might prove useful in helping people who have lost their capacity to remember as a result of brain injury or disease.

The researchers have shown that the way the brain first captures and encodes a situation or event is quite different from the way it handles subsequent learning of similar events. It is this second stage learning that holds promise if the process can be mimicked therapeutically.

Memories are formed in the part of the brain known as the ‘hippocampus’, a structure the shape of ram’s horns that passes through the right and left hemispheres. The hippocampus is very susceptible to damage through stroke or lack of oxygen, and is critically involved in Alzheimer’s disease…

WAKO, JAPAN—Susumu Tonegawa, 70, has never shied away from challenges. He left Japan to earn a Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of California, San Diego. After a postdoc at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, also in San Diego, he joined the Basel Institute for Immunology in Switzerland, where he solved the riddle of how mammals produce billions of different antibodies needed to fend off infections—work that earned him the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1987.

Tonegawa was then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, where he shifted his focus to neuroscience and in 1994 became the founding director of what is now called the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT. After a 2006 flap over the aborted hiring of a young female scientist at another MIT institute, Tonegawa gave up the directorship to concentrate on research. But this April, he became director of the RIKEN Brain Science Institute (BSI) in Wako, near Tokyo, a part-time arrangement that allows him to maintain a lab at MIT.

BSI was established in 1997 and now has more than 50 principal investigators (PIs) and a $100 million annual budget. Considered Japan’s flagship neuroscience institute, BSI is “pretty good,” Tonegawa says, but it doesn’t match the reputation and productivity of top U.S. and European neuroscience centers. Tonegawa spoke with Science earlier this month about how he intends to raise BSI’s game while coping with what he views as an inevitable downsizing…

Susumu Tonegawa’s father and uncle were engineers and scientists, which was probably the initial influence in his deciding to pursue a career in science. By his senior year in college, fueled by the cornerstone papers by François Jacob and Jacques Monod of the Pasteur Institute, his interests were turning toward the nascent field of molecular biology. Molecular biology was just emerging as a discipline, and the lab of Professor Itaru Watanabe at the Institute for Virus Research at Kyoto University was one of Japan’s earliest pioneers in the field. However, Professor Watanabe encouraged Susumu to apply to UCSD, which was just being established. Professor Watanabe spoke with David Bonner, the head of the new Department of Biology there, and arranged for Susumu to attend the graduate school. At that point, Susumu knew nothing about the brain or prokaryotic molecular biology, but began by studying the field in the laboratory of Professor Masaki Hayashi. He then moved to the Salk Institute for 2 years, to the lab of Renato Dulbecco, who was to have a profound influence on his life. Professor Dulbecco was an expert in tumor virology, and Susumu wanted to study more complex systems with a focus on eukaryotic molecular biology…