2013: The Best Biomedicine Stories of the Year

By Susan Young

While the fights and fumbles over the Affordable Care Act dominated headlines in 2013, the year was also heady with advances in biomedicine. In April, President Obama announced an ambitious federal initiative to map the activity of all the neurons in a brain circuit or, ideally, a whole brain. The $100 million Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) project will support neuroscientists, nanotechnologists, and others who propose to develop new technologies that can monitor thousands of neurons simultaneously.

The hope is that such new innovations could help neuroscientists understand the biological origin of cognition and perception and speed the development of treatments for disorders such as autism or post-traumatic stress disorder. There was remarkable progress in the field of neuroscience this year, but researchers still struggle to understand and treat the brain.

This year, the FDA approved the first artificial retina prosthetic for use in the United States following the California-made devices European approval in 2011. That light-detecting system can replace some of the visual information lost by patients whose retinas, which are an extension of brain tissue, have become damaged by genetic disease. A German company announced that an alternative retina prostheses system had helped patients detect everyday object like doorknobs and read large letters.

Mini brain: An organoid derived from stem cells contains different brain regions. Green shows neurons and pink/red shows neuronal stem cells.

This year also brought to light a three-dimensional bit of brain tissue, grown from stem cells in a lab, which could be used to study brain function and dysfunction and to potentially screen new medications for toxicity and efficacy. That work builds on top of progress in the field of regenerative biology to grow liver buds and retina tissues in a dish. Scientists also reported in 2013 that they had created a false memory in mice, by manipulating neurons that bear the memory of a place. The work lays new ground for understanding the cell behavior and circuitry that controls memory.

A new type of deep-brain stimulator was implanted into a patient for the first time this year. Deep-brain stimulators are used to deliver therapeutic electric pulses to treat disorders ranging from Parkinsons to obsessive-compulsive disorder. The new device can also record brain activity, which could one day lead to self-regulating implants and may more immediately give researchers an unprecedented look at brain disorders in patients during day-to-day activities.

Many brain disorders remain difficult to treat. Despite a pressing need and large investments in time and money, an Alzheimers treatment continues to evade pharmaceutical companies. And new neuroscience techniques are uncovering what seems to be a pervasive brain injury for soldiers and for adults and children who play high-impact sports such as football. In January, researchers reported they had been able to identify signs of a degenerative brain disorder called chronic traumatic encephalopathy in retired NFL players, the first time the condition could be seen in the brain of a living person.

In addition to its big push for brain technologies, the federal government also made big news in biomedicine this year with the Supreme Courts decision that natural human genes cannot be patented. The ruling was mixedgenes that are identical in sequence to those found in the human genome cannot be patented, but lab-modified versions can. The ruling was made on a suit between Myriad Genetics, a medical diagnostics company, and the Association for Molecular Pathology, a scientific society, over whether Myriad could patent sequences from two genes related to the risk of breast and ovarian cancers. The sequences of these genes are used by Myriad in its tests to determine whether patients are at great risk for developing breast or ovarian cancer.

Early in the year, scientists described some of the privacy risks people may undertake when they allow their genetic information to be used in research studies. The potential for unwanted identification of DNA donors helped influence some of the cautious planning behind the U.K.s push to become a leader in the genomics industry. The countrys National Health Service will integrate genomic analyses into its hospitals and clinics and plans to share aggregated data with researchers from around the world, but will keep all individual-level data within NHS buildings.

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2013: The Best Biomedicine Stories of the Year