Researchers know these quantum materials get their abilities from electrons that join forces to form a sort of electron soup. But modeling this process in all its complexity would take far more time and computing power than anyone can imagine having today. So for understanding one key class of unconventional superconductors — copper oxides, or cuprates — researchers created, for simplicity, a theoretical model in which the material exists in just one dimension, as a string of atoms. They made these one-dimensional cuprates in the lab and found that their behavior agreed with the theory pretty well.

Unfortunately, these 1D atomic chains lacked one thing: They could not be doped, a process where some atoms are replaced by others to change the number of electrons that are free to move around. Doping is one of several factors scientists can adjust to tweak the behavior of materials like these, and it’s a critical part of getting them to superconduct.

Now a study led by scientists at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford and Clemson universities has synthesized the first 1D cuprate material that can be doped. Their analysis of the doped material suggests that the most prominent proposed model of how cuprates achieve superconductivity is missing a key ingredient: an unexpectedly strong attraction between neighboring electrons in the material’s atomic structure, or lattice. That attraction, they said, may be the result of interactions with natural lattice vibrations.

The team reported their findings today in Science.

“The inability to controllably dope one-dimensional cuprate systems has been a significant barrier to understanding these materials for more than two decades,” said Zhi-Xun Shen, a Stanford professor and investigator with the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES) at SLAC.

“Now that we’ve done it,” he said, “our experiments show that our current model misses a very important phenomenon that’s present in the real material.”

Zhuoyu Chen, a postdoctoral researcher in Shen’s lab who led the experimental part of the study, said the research was made possible by a system the team developed for making 1D chains embedded in a 3D material and moving them directly into a chamber at SLAC’s Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) for analysis with a powerful X-ray beam.

“It’s a unique setup,” he said, “and indispensable for achieving the high-quality data we needed to see these very subtle effects.”

From grids to chains, in theory

The predominant model used to simulate these complex materials is known as the Hubbard model. In its 2D version, it is based on a flat, evenly spaced grid of the simplest possible atoms.

But this basic 2D grid is already too complicated for today’s computers and algorithms to handle, said Thomas Devereaux, a SLAC and Stanford professor and SIMES investigator who supervised the theoretical part of this work. There’s no well-accepted way to make sure the model’s calculations for the material’s physical properties are correct, so if they don’t match experimental results it’s impossible to tell whether the calculations or the theoretical model went wrong.

To solve that problem, scientists have applied the Hubbard model to 1D chains of the simplest possible cuprate lattice — a string of copper and oxygen atoms. This 1D version of the model can accurately calculate and capture the collective behavior of electrons in materials made of undoped 1D chains. But until now, there hasn’t been a way to test the accuracy of its predictions for the doped versions of the chains because no one was able to make them in the lab, despite more than two decades of trying.

“Our major achievement was in synthesizing these doped chains,” Chen said. “We were able to dope them over a very wide range and get systematic data to pin down what we were observing.”

One atomic layer at a time

To make the doped 1D chains, Chen and his colleagues sprayed a film of a cuprate material known as barium strontium copper oxide (BSCO), just a few atomic layers thick, onto a supportive surface inside a sealed chamber at the specially designed SSRL beamline. The shape of the lattices in the film and on the surface lined up in a way that created 1D chains of copper and oxygen embedded in the 3D BSCO material.

They doped the chains by exposing them to ozone and heat, which added oxygen atoms to their atomic lattices, Chen said. Each oxygen atom pulled an electron out of the chain, and those freed-up electrons become more mobile. When millions of these free-flowing electrons come together, they can create the collective state that’s the basis of superconductivity.

Next the researchers shuttled their chains into another part of the beamline for analysis with angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, or ARPES. This technique ejected electrons from the chains and measured their direction and energy, giving scientists a detailed and sensitive picture of how the electrons in the material behave.

Surprisingly strong attractions

Their analysis showed that in the doped 1D material, the electrons’ attraction to their counterparts in neighboring lattice sites is 10 times stronger than the Hubbard model predicts, said Yao Wang, an assistant professor at Clemson University who worked on the theory side of the study.

The research team suggested that this high level of “nearest-neighbor” attraction may stem from interactions with phonons — natural vibrations that jiggle the atomic latticework. Phonons are known to play a role in conventional superconductivity, and there are indications that they could also be involved in a different way in unconventional superconductivity that occurs at much warmer temperatures in materials like the cuprates, although that has not been definitively proven.

The scientists said it’s likely that this strong nearest-neighbor attraction between electrons exists in all the cuprates and could help in understanding superconductivity in the 2D versions of the Hubbard model and its kin, giving scientists a more complete picture of these puzzling materials.

Researchers from DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory contributed to this work, which was funded by the DOE Office of Science. SSRL is an Office of Science user facility.

Published in the Journal of Mammalogy, the study of the reproduction and size of wild black bears living in and around the city of Asheville, North Carolina, has important implications for managing urban bear populations. Also, the results raise questions about the foraging activities and diet of urban bears, and whether food from people or an abundance of natural food could be providing the bears with a reproductive advantage.

“Some of the bears in Asheville are reproducing at a young age, and they are big,” said the study’s lead author Nick Gould, postdoctoral research scholar at NC State. “It definitely leads us, as researchers, to ask additional questions: What’s driving this kind of weight gain in young bears this early in life? Are they eating natural foods, bird seed and ornamental fruit, or feeding on residential garbage?”

For this study, researchers collaborated with the residents of Asheville to capture black bears on private property between April 2014 and September 2018. The bears were temporarily sedated and then released on-site where they were captured. Researchers collected data on the bears’ weight, age, general condition, sex, and other information. The research team used GPS-equipped radio collars, which were designed to fall off naturally or to be released remotely, to track the female bears to their den sites to monitor reproductive activity.

They collected data on a total of 36 female bears around 1 year of age in Asheville. As a point of comparison, the researchers used data from three previous studies of bears living in rural areas in national forests in North Carolina and Virginia. They compared the data for urban female yearling bears to data for 95 female yearlings in rural forested areas.

Researchers determined that the 36 female bears in Asheville weighed an average of nearly 100 pounds at 1 to 1 and a half years of age. In contrast, the sample of 95 female bears living in the three national forests weighed an average of 50 pounds at a similar age.

Of the 12 female bears they were able to track back to their dens by their second birthdays in Asheville, seven produced a total of 11 cubs. In comparison, none of the three studies of bears in rural forested areas found that bears produced cubs by their second birthday.

“We didn’t expect 2-year-old females to be giving birth,” Gould said. “Based on what we know about black bears, we thought we’d see litters from bears 3 years of age and older. These results open up new areas of research to learn more about wildlife living among people in developed areas.”

The researchers analyzed and compared the availability of an important natural food source for bears — acorns and other nuts — and didn’t find differences that could help explain the larger size of these young female bears in the city.

However, researchers didn’t examine the availability of other important natural food sources like berries and didn’t investigate whether bears were eating bird seed or food and garbage left out by people. That is the current focus of ongoing research in the Asheville area led by study co-author Chris DePerno, professor of fisheries, wildlife and conservation biology at NC State, with Gould and graduate student Jennifer Strules.

“Interestingly, natural food production, in the form of nuts and other ‘hard mast’ food sources, did not influence cub production for urban bears,” Gould said. “We are left to conclude that either natural foods, in the form of soft mast like berries, or anthropogenic food sources in the form of garbage, bird seed, ornamental fruit trees or intentional feeding by people, is influencing the weight gain and early reproduction.”

Reproduction is one piece of the equation needed to better understand black bears inhabiting urban areas. Researchers said that while they appear to be reproducing earlier in some cities, urban bears’ mortality may also be high, as they are more likely to be involved in collisions with vehicles.

“If mortality is high enough to exceed reproduction, then that population is likely going to be a sink,” Gould said. “If bears are attracted to Asheville, and they establish residency because of the supplemental food sources it offers, they’re also going to be exposed to collisions with vehicles, legal harvest, and other anthropogenic threats, and therefore mortality may outpace reproduction, suggesting the population might be functioning as a sink.”

This study is part the North Carolina Urban/Suburban Bear Study, initiated by NC State and the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission to understand urban black bears’ survival and causes of mortality, movements, reproduction and other factors when they live around cities. The goal is to help wildlife managers develop better policies for bears and other wildlife near cities.

“The entire objective is to help the Wildlife Commission better manage bears,” DePerno said. “The urban-rural interface is larger with population growth and development, and that puts greater pressure on wildlife populations.

“We have a situation in western North Carolina where we have people in a wonderful area with a lot of bears,” he added. “We want to understand: Is this a source or sink population? Are the bears moving into huntable areas? Are they considered more as residential or transitory? We are trying to understand what these bears are doing and their entire life history, including what is killing them, and what are they eating.”

Researchers also want to help educate the public.

“We want to provide good information about black bears based on the science, so we can help guide people in urban areas with bears, in Asheville or otherwise, to live responsibly with them,” Gould said.

The study, “Growth and reproduction by young urban and black rural bears,” was published online July 10, 2021, in the Journal of Mammalogy. In addition to Gould and DePerno, the other co-authors were Roger Powell and Colleen Olfenbuttel. The project was funded by the Pittman-Robertson Federal Aid to Wildlife Restoration Grant and is a joint research project between the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission and the Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology Program at North Carolina State University

The top three causes of non-recurring traffic delays are crashes, work zones, and adverse weather conditions, with work zones accounting for 10% of all non-recurring delays. Precise work zone impact prediction could significantly alleviate fuel consumption and air pollution.

“Machine learning and deep learning are powerful tools to build different types of data and predict future situations. Using AI for analyzing data is the future of transportation engineering in general,” Rashidi said.

The Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) collects various types of data related to work zone operations. Working with these data, Rashidi and graduate research assistant Ali Hassandokht Mashhadi explored ways to evaluate the impacts of different variables on traffic and mobility conditions for the entire roadway system. This analysis could help UDOT better understand and plan for more efficient work zone operations, select the most effective traffic management systems for work zones, and assess the hidden costs of construction operations at work zones.

WHAT FACTORS IMPACT AUTOMOBILE TRAFFIC?

The traffic impacts of work zones can vary depending upon other existing conditions and how they intersect with work zone factors:

• Work Zone Factors: the layout and location of the work zone, length of the road closure, traffic speed at the work zone, and daily active hours.
• Traffic Factors: the percentage of heavy vehicles, highway speed limit, capacity, mobility, flow, density, congestion and occupancy.
• Road Factors: the number of total lanes, number of open lanes, pavement grade and condition.
• Temporal Factors: the year, season, month, day of the week, time of day, and darkness/light.
• Spatial Factors: road lane width and the presence and number of highway ramps nearby.

UDOT collects massive amounts of raw data on work zones, including data about the above factors, which made this project possible.

The deep neural network (DNN) model developed by the researchers is capable of evaluating the impacts of multiple factors, and the interplay between them. DNNs can capture the relationships between input variables and output, in contrast to traditional machine learning algorithms.

HOW DOES THE MODEL PERFORM?

The DNN was trained and evaluated on around 400,000 data points collected from about 80 projects on Utah roadways. Researchers evaluated the model’s performance using three different measures, including R2 score, Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) and Mean Absolute Error (MAE). The accuracy of all types of work zone results, including short and long term, day and night time, and interstate and arterial work zones, were acceptable, with under 2% error in the predicted traffic volume. This is the first study that has attempted to investigate the effects of work zone features on hourly traffic volume.

The main benefit of the proposed model is that it does not require users to set various adjustment factors based on practical experience. Previously developed models usually need a couple of adjustment factors in the mathematical model to estimate the work zone capacity. However, the model developed by Rashidi and Mashhadi is capable of estimating hourly traffic volumes without any need for adding factors manually. It is also worth noting that, by using work zone features, road features and temporal features as the input variables, the model can estimate work zone traffic even in areas without any traffic sensors.

IMPLEMENTING THE METHOD

Funded by a NITC Small Starts grant, this pilot project has shown promising results. To get this model into the hands of professionals who can use it, the research team has already published one paper in Transportation Research Record: Review of Methods for Estimating Construction Work Zone Capacity, and are in the process of publishing another journal paper. Next steps include sharing the outcomes of the research with UDOT to get their feedback and ascertain how the model could be useful for them. Rashidi also hopes to expand the model’s capabilities with future research.

“This study was focused on Utah data, so it would be great if we can conduct similar studies and compare the results with other states; see how the behavior patterns are similar,” Rashidi said.

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New collaborative research from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and five partner institutions (University of Arizona, University of Washington, Pennsylvania State University, Desert Research Institute and University of Bergen), published today in Nature Geoscience, reveals that during past periods glaciers and ice caps in coastal west Greenland experienced climate conditions much different than the interior of Greenland. Over the past 2,000 years, these ice caps endured periods of warming during which they grew larger rather than shrinking.

This novel study breaks down the climate history displayed in a core taken from an ice cap off Greenland’s western coast. According to the study’s researchers, while ice core drilling has been ongoing in Greenland since the mid-20^th century, coastal ice core studies remain extremely limited, and these new findings are providing a new perspective on climate change compared to what scientists previously understood by using ice cores from the interior portions of the Greenland ice sheet alone.

“Glaciers and ice caps are unique high-resolution repositories of Earth’s climate history, and ice core analysis allows scientists to examine how environmental changes — like shifts in precipitation patterns and global warming — affect rates of snowfall, melting, and in turn influence ice cap growth and retreat,” said Sarah Das, Associate Scientist of Geology and Geophysics at WHOI. “Looking at differences in climate change recorded across several ice core records allows us to compare and contrast the climate history and ice response across different regions of the Arctic.” However, during the course of this study, it also became clear that many of these coastal ice caps are now melting so substantially that these incredible archives are in great peril of disappearing forever.

Due to the challenging nature of studying and accessing these ice caps, this team was the first to do such work, centering their study, which began in 2015, around a core collected from the Nuussuaq Peninsula in Greenland. This single core offers insight into how coastal climate conditions and ice cap changes covaried during the last 2,000 years, due to tracked changes in its chemical composition and the amount of snowfall archived year after year in the core. Through their analysis, investigators found that during periods of past warming, ice caps were growing rather than melting, contradicting what we see in the present day.

“Currently, we know Greenland’s ice caps are melting due to warming, further contributing to sea level rise. But, we have yet to explore how these ice caps have changed in the past due to changes in climate,” said Matthew Osman, postdoctoral research associate at the University of Arizona and a 2019 graduate of the MIT-WHOI Joint program. “The findings of this study were a surprise because we see that there is an ongoing shift in the fundamental response of these ice caps to climate: today, they’re disappearing, but in the past, within small degrees of warming, they actually tended to grow.”

According to Das and Osman, this phenomenon happens because of a “tug-of-war” between what causes an ice cap to grow (increased precipitation) or recede (increased melting) during periods of warming. Today, scientists observe melting rates that are outpacing the rate of annual snowfall atop ice caps. However, in past centuries these ice caps would expand due to increased levels of precipitation brought about by warmer temperatures. The difference between the past and present is the severity of modern anthropogenic warming.

The team gathered this data by drilling through an ice cap on top of one of the higher peaks of the Nuussuaq Peninsula. The entire core, about 140 meters in length, took about a week to retrieve. They then brought the meter-long pieces of core to the National Science Foundation Ice Core Facility in Denver, Colorado, and stored at -20 degrees Celsius. The core pieces were then analyzed by their layers for melt features and trace chemistry at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada. By looking at different properties of the core’s chemical content, such as parts per billion of lead and sulfur, investigators were able to accurately date the core by combining these measurements with a model of past glacier flow.

“These model estimates of ice cap flow, coupled with the actual ages that we have from this high precision chemistry, help us outline changes in ice cap growth over time. This method provides a new way of understanding past ice cap changes and how that is correlated with climate,” said Das. “Because we’re collecting a climate record from the coast, we’re able to document for the first time that there were these large shifts in temperature, snowfall and melt over the last 2,000 years, showing much more variability than is observed in records from the interior of Greenland,” Das added.

“Our findings should urge researchers to return to these remaining ice caps and collect new climate records while they still exist,” added Osman.

The process, detailed recently in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Sustainable Chemical Engineering, turns hydrogen sulfide — more commonly called “sewer gas” — into hydrogen fuel. Hydrogen sulfide is emitted from manure piles and sewer pipes and is a key byproduct of industrial activities including refining oil and gas, producing paper and mining.

The process detailed in this study uses relatively little energy and a relatively cheap material — the chemical iron sulfide with a trace amount of molybdenum as an additive.

In addition to smelling like rotten eggs, hydrogen sulfide is highly toxic, corroding pipes and harming the health of people who encounter it.

“Hydrogen sulfide is one of the most harmful gases in industry and to the environment,” said Lang Qin, a co-author on the study and a research associate in chemical and biomolecular engineering at The Ohio State University. “And because the gas is so harmful, a number of researchers want to turn hydrogen sulfide into something that is not so harmful, preferably valuable.”

The study is built on previous work by the same research group using a process called chemical looping, which involves adding metal oxide particles in high-pressure reactors to burn fuels without direct contact between air and fuel. The team first used chemical looping on coal and shale gas to convert fossil fuels into electricity without emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The initial process used iron oxide to break down the fossil fuels.

The researchers later applied the concept to hydrogen sulfide and invented the SULGEN process, which converts hydrogen sulfide into hydrogen. The researchers found that the pure chemical, iron sulfide, didn’t perform well at the large scales needed for industrial use, Qin said. The research team has been trying to identify other inexpensive chemicals that could catalyze that transformation in higher quantities. This study shows that introducing a trace amount of molybdenum into iron sulfide might be an attractive option.

That material is relatively inexpensive and easy to acquire, making it an attractive option for larger-scale operations.

Transforming this toxic gas into hydrogen fuel creates an alternative oil and gas, which are major contributors to climate change, the researchers said.

“It is too soon to tell if our research can replace any of the hydrogen fuel production technologies that are out there,” said Kalyani Jangam, lead author of the study and a graduate student in Ohio State’s Clean Energy Research Laboratory. “But what we are doing is adjusting this decomposition process and making a valuable product from that.”

For this most recent study, the researchers found that molybdenum improves the breakdown of hydrogen sulfide, splitting it into two parts — hydrogen fuel and sulfur.

This work is early in the scientific process — the researchers showed that the process worked in the lab; tests at the industrial level are forthcoming.

“The big picture is we want to solve the harmful gas issue, and we thought that our chemical looping process would allow that,” Qin said. “And here, we have found a way to do it in the lab that creates this value-added hydrogen fuel.”

The senior author on this paper is Liang-Shih Fan, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Ohio State. Yu-Yen Chen, a former doctoral student in Fan’s laboratory, also contributed.

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This is a common situation after a traumatic brain injury — many people experience bad side effects months or years later. These long-term effects can last a few days or the rest of a person’s life.

“No therapies currently exist to prevent the disabilities that can develop after a brain trauma,” says Jeanne Paz, PhD, associate investigator at Gladstone Institutes. “So, understanding how the traumatic brain injury affects the brain, especially in the long term, is a really important gap in research that could help develop new and better treatment options.”

In a new study published in the journal Science, Paz and her team helped close that gap. They identified a specific molecule in a part of the brain called the thalamus that plays a key role in secondary effects of brain injury, such as sleep disruption, epileptic activity, and inflammation. In collaboration with scientists at Annexon Biosciences, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, they also showed that an antibody treatment could prevent the development of these negative outcomes.

A Vulnerable Brain Region

Traumatic brain injuries, which range from a mild concussion to a severe injury, can be the result of a fall, sports injury, gunshot injury, blow to the head, explosion, or domestic violence. Often, soldiers returning from war also suffer head injuries, which commonly lead to the development of epilepsy. Traumatic brain injury affects 69 million people around the world annually, and is the leading cause of death in children and a major source of disability in adults.

“These injuries are frequent and can happen to anyone,” says Paz, who is also an associate professor of neurology at UC San Francisco (UCSF) and a member of the Kavli Institute for Fundamental Neuroscience. “The goal of our study was to understand how the brain changes after traumatic brain injuries and how those changes can lead to chronic problems, such as the development of epilepsy, sleep disruption, and difficulty with sensory processing.”

To do so, Paz and her team recorded the activity of different cells and circuits in the brain of mice after brain injury. The researchers monitored the mice continually and wirelessly, meaning the mice could go about their normal activities without being disrupted.

“We collected so much data, from the time of injury and over the next several months, that it actually crashed our computers,” says Paz. “But it was important to capture all the different stages of sleep and wakefulness to get the whole picture.”

During a trauma to the head, the region of the brain called the cerebral cortex is often the primary site of injury, because it sits directly beneath the skull.

But at later time points, the researchers discovered that another region — the thalamus — was even more disrupted than the cortex. In particular, they found that a molecule called C1q was present at abnormally high levels in the thalamus for months after the initial injury, and these high levels were associated with inflammation, dysfunctional brain circuits, and the death of neurons.

“The thalamus seems particularly vulnerable, even after a mild traumatic brain injury,” says Stephanie Holden, PhD, first author of the study and former graduate student in Paz’s lab at Gladstone. “This doesn’t mean the cortex isn’t affected, but simply that it might have the necessary tools to recover over time. Our findings suggest that the higher levels of C1q in the thalamus could contribute to several long-term effects of brain injury.”

The Paz Lab collaborated with Eleonora Aronica, MD, PhD, a neuropathologist at the University of Amsterdam, to validate their findings in human brain tissues obtained from autopsies, in which they found high levels of the C1q molecule in the thalamus 8 days after people had sustained a traumatic brain injury. In addition, by working with fellow Gladstone Assistant Investigator Ryan Corces, PhD, they determined that C1q in the thalamus likely came from microglia, the immune cells in the brain.

“Our study answered some very big questions in the field about where and how changes are happening in the brain after a trauma, and which ones are actually important for causing deficits,” says Paz.

The Right Window to Treat Chronic Effects After Traumatic Brain Injury

The C1q molecule, which is part of an immune pathway, has well-documented roles in brain development and normal brain functions. For instance, it protects the central nervous system from infection and helps the brain forget memories — a process needed to store new memories. The accumulation of C1q in the brain has also been studied in various neurological and psychiatric disorders and is associated, for example, with Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia.

“C1q can be both good and bad,” says Paz. “We wanted to find a way to prevent this molecule’s detrimental effect, but without impacting its beneficial role. This is an example of what makes neuroscience a really hard field these days, but it’s also what makes it exciting.”

She and her group decided to leverage the “latent phase” after a traumatic brain injury, during which changes are occurring in the brain but before long-term symptoms appear.

“My cousin, for example, was hit in the head when he was 10 years old, and the impact broke his skull and damaged his brain,” says Paz. “But it wasn’t until he was 20 that he developed epilepsy. This latent phase presents a window of opportunity for us to intervene in hopes of modifying the disease and preventing any complications.”

Paz reached out to her collaborators at Annexon Biosciences, who produce a clinical antibody that can block the activity of the C1q molecule. Then, her team treated the mice who sustained brain injury with this antibody to see if it might have beneficial effects.

When the researchers studied mice genetically engineered to lack C1q at the time of the trauma, the brain injury appeared much worse. However, when they selectively blocked C1q with the antibody during the latent phase, they prevented chronic inflammation and the loss of neurons in the thalamus.

“This indicates that the C1q molecule shouldn’t be blocked at the time of injury, because it’s likely very important at this stage for protecting the brain and helping prevent cell death,” says Holden. “But at later time points, blocking C1q can actually reduce harmful inflammatory responses. It’s a way of telling the brain, ‘It’s okay, you’ve done the protective part and you can now turn off the inflammation.'”

“There is a paucity of treatments for patients who have suffered from an acute brain injury,” says Ted Yednock, PhD, executive vice president and chief scientific officer at Annexon Biosciences, and an author of the study. “This result is exciting because it suggests that we could treat patients in the hours to days after an acute injury like traumatic brain injury to protect against secondary neuronal damage and provide significant functional benefit.”

Path to a Potential Treatment

In addition to chronic inflammation, Paz and her team also uncovered abnormal brain activity in the mice with traumatic brain injury.

First, the researchers noticed disruptions in sleep spindles, which are normal brain rhythms that occur during sleep. These are important for memory consolidation, among other things. The scientists also found epileptic spikes, or abnormal fluctuations in brain activity. These spikes can be disruptive to cognition and normal behavior, and are also indicative of a greater susceptibility to seizures.

The scientists observed that the anti-C1q antibody treatment not only helped restore the sleep spindles, but also prevented the development of epileptic activities.

“Overall, our study indicates that targeting the C1q molecule after injury could avoid some of the most devastating, long-term consequences of traumatic brain injury,” says Holden. “We hope this could eventually lead to the development of treatments for traumatic brain injury.”

Annexon’s anti-C1q inhibitors are designed to treat multiple autoimmune and neurological disorders, and are already being examined in clinical trials, including for an autoimmune disorder known as Guillain-Barré syndrome, where the drug has been shown to be safe in humans.

“The fact that the drug is already in clinical trials may speed the pace at which a treatment could eventually be made available to patients,” says Yednock. “We already understand doses of drug that are safe and effective in patients for blocking C1q in the brain, and could move directly into studies that ameliorate the chronic effects after traumatic brain injury.”

For Holden, who previously worked with individuals who experienced brain injury and heard many of their personal stories, the impact of this study is particularly meaningful.

“Brain injury is a hidden disability for many of the people I met,” she says. “The side effects they experience can be difficult to diagnose and their physicians often can’t provide any medical treatment. Being able to contribute to finding ways to treat the detrimental consequences of the injury after it happens is really inspiring.”

Paz and her lab are continuing to expand their understanding of what happens in the brain after injury. Next, they will focus on studying whether they can help prevent convulsive seizures, which are often reported by people with severe traumatic brain injuries.

“The holy grail would be to have a treatment that could be offered to a patient after a trauma and that would prevent chronic inflammation in the brain, sleep disruption, and seizures,” she adds. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our study helped make that a reality?”