Ed Boyden: evaluation

Transcript context

…To be speculative, it might someday be possible that you could fix somebody’s Alzheimer’s by showing them a movie. I think of optogenetics as a tool for discovering how to repair the brain, but then you can build very practical technologies to try to help people. My collaborator, Li-Huei Tsai, led a project where she used our optogenetic tools, initially, to discover a pattern of brain activity that, in mice engineered to get the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, would actually make them better. Then the teams went on to actually discover that, through a movie — a bunch of blinking lights and so forth — you could simulate the same pattern of activity. Li-Huei and I have now cofounded a company, Cognito Therapeutics, to effectively do human trials of movies to treat Alzheimer’s. What’s the most likely therapeutic application that might come next?…

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