Claude Shuttleworth
University of New Mexico, NM·Neuroscience
When the brain is injured by a stroke or a blow to the head, the damage does not stop at the moment of injury. Tissue around the original injury can continue to deteriorate for days.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
Physiology
- Topics
spreading depolarization
stroke
traumatic brain injury
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jun 2030
What they work on
- Test whether spreading depolarization, a wave of mass electrical silencing in brain tissue, activates protective mechanisms over seconds to minutes, examining diffusible protective factors and metabolic substrate support in brain slices.
- Determine whether spreading depolarization waves invading surviving peri-infarct tissue, the rim around a stroke core, promote neuronal survival in a focal stroke model, and identify the pathways that inhibit cell death and support remodeling over days to weeks.
- Test whether the balance between damaging and beneficial effects of spreading depolarization can be shifted, by modifying recovery from individual wave events or by engaging long-term adaptive processes.
- Sustain preclinical and clinical research cores serving brain injury investigators across the institution, providing shared equipment, training and methods development for new and established researchers.
- Expand an enhanced pilot grant program to grow the number of investigators working on acquired brain injury and support their progression to independent extramural funding.
More about the research
One reason appears to be spreading depolarization, a slow wave in which large numbers of brain cells lose their normal electrical charge and fall silent, then have to spend considerable energy restoring themselves. Clinical recordings show that clusters of these waves accompany worsening damage in stroke and trauma patients. Understanding when these waves harm tissue and when they might help is the thread connecting this work, which spans laboratory mechanism studies and an institution-wide center supporting brain injury research.
Why it matters
Stroke and traumatic brain injury are leading causes of death in New Mexico, and survivors often live with lasting disability. Identifying how spreading depolarization waves can protect rather than damage tissue could point to treatments given hours or days after injury, when patients are already in hospital, and could guide the design of future preclinical and clinical trials. The center's shared cores and pilot funding give investigators across the institution the tools to pursue treatments that speed recovery of function.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Ghanim Ullah
University of South Florida, FL·Neuroscience
Test whether recurrent metabolic stress and spreading depolarization, a wave of electrical silencing in the brain, promote amyloid β40 and β42 clumping in the space between cells and in endosomes/lysosomes.
Alexander Mongin
Albany Medical College, NY·Neuroscience
Test whether LRRC8A-containing volume-regulated anion channels (VRACs) control extracellular taurine and GABA, inhibitory brain chemicals, using microdialysis in mice with brain-specific LRRC8A deletion that develop lethal seizures.
Todd A Fiacco
University of California-Riverside, CA·Neuroscience
Determine how much the volume-regulated anion channel in astrocytes contributes to brain tissue swelling and seizure generation in living mice, using astrocyte-specific conditional knockout animals.
The school
University of New Mexico: 27 labs on PI Pages, $355M a year on research, 182 research doctorates a year.
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