 Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, thank you again for joining us to here in the basement of the Congress Center here in Davos for the third issue brief of the day. We've just finished up on currency shocks and we're having a bit of a change of pace, a change of subject. We're now on the subject of neuro-research. I'm honoured to be joined by two very eminent scientists who've just been upstairs on a specially dedicated session in one of our ideas lab rooms on the subject of the brain and the research that's going on around it. I have to my immediate left here Ann Brunette who's a professor of genetics at Stanford School of Medicine at Stanford University and Marion Buchwalter on the far left is assistant professor of neurology and neurosurgery again at Stanford University Medical Center. Now that seems like a fitting place to start this conversation. I understand there are four people from Stanford in the ideas lab you've just come from. What is it about Stanford that's setting you out as the leading centre for brain research? Well, I think one of the things is that we have world class basic science. But there's several places that also have world class basic science. One of the things that we have that really distinguishes us is we have really a fantastic environment of innovation. So we're right in the middle of Silicon Valley. We have a university that's incredibly strong in multiple areas and that really fosters not just innovation but collaboration. So we get the opportunity to work with people from many different fields on the questions that we think are the most important. Ann, you're an expert on aging so the obvious question is can we reverse aging? It's a question many people not just here in the congress centre but all over the world would be keen to learn. Yes, so basically until like recently aging was thought to be just an inexorable one-way road towards death basically. But this view has changed because now there are some indications that genetic and environmental factors can in fact at the very least delay but now even more excitingly revert some aspects of aging meaning like an already old organism with some treatment can to some degree come back to a more youthful way. So there are several ways in which doing that one of the most prominent one that our colleague Tony Whiskory discussed at the Ideas Lab was to inject young blood to an old organism and that makes it rejuvenate in the brain but also the muscle and other aspects of the body. There are also other research that has come from the study of the genetic of aging which is some of the things we do. So for example a path a genetic pathway can be manipulated by a drug called it's called rapamycin and this extends lifespan so that's already very interesting in and of itself but when rapamycin is given to an old animal it can revert some aspects again of the old animal and make it more functional. So indeed like there is hope for the first time that some aspects of aging can be at least to some degree reversed so that's cool. What kind of aspects are we talking about? Are we talking mental capability or physical prowess? Both actually because so Tony upstairs discussed mental capability like learning and memory by tests that are done in mice but you can also and we work on neuro stem cells and you can see also that some of those treatments have an impact on the ability of the brain to rejuvenate some to regenerate some new neurons but that's not limited to just the brain because other groups at Harvard for example Amy Weigels has shown that other so some aspects of the heart some aspects of the muscle Tom Rendo at Stanford as well so some aspect of the muscles other tissues are also rejuvenated not all probably but a lot of tissues can be rejuvenated by those treatments. What are the practical applications at this stage? We're obviously too early but when can we expect to see this being this science being applied on humans and what would be the impact are we looking at living forever living for another 10 years can you give us an idea of what your realistic expectations are for the limit for the limits of this knowledge and disability that you're on the cusp of discovering. So basically I think it's very interesting because right now this past two years has been a boom in industry actually being interested in aging research because for the for longest time it was more like a basic science research but Google has started a company called Calico and it's really amazing what they've decided to do is to fund basically a translation of the basic science to humans and to extend what we call the health span which is the healthy the non-diseased portion of life and then Craig Venter has also started his own company called longevity Inc and I think a lot of people then are following the lead of Google and Calico and Craig Venter into like a lot of venture capitalists are now interested because it really seems at this point that there is a lot of handles drugs or like blood like our colleague Tony who started his own company actually and yeah there's a lot of different handles that can be used so it's really a good time now whether this societally I think the goal is really to try and extend the to compress the morbidity to extend the healthy portion of life where people don't have disease so it's not it's less of a burden on society now it is true that all those treatments at least in animals they also tend to extend the lifespan of the animal so one has to think about like what would extending the lifespan of humans could do so there's probably like a genetic limit to the extension of lifespan around like probably a hundred and ten or twenty years genetically speaking but you know what will it mean if we have a lot of people like being a hundred years old if they're in good health the UK actually has done a big study to sort of like well so basically people have done big studies to try to see the implication of having more old people around but if those people are healthy they can actually amazingly contribute to society because of wisdom like acquired experiences and things like that so I'm pretty hopeful but I can see how it can be a problem it's an optimistic picture as somebody in advancing middle age can confirm now Marion moving on to your field of expertise which is which is stroke recovery if I'm not mistaken what's making that such an exciting area of science right now one of the most exciting things is that we have the availability of new tools to really begin to understand how the brain recovers and it's it's it's funny how it's all tied together to so like we're talking about making things young again one of the things we take advantage of is that younger people actually recover a lot better from a stroke than older people and so part of rejuvenation is probably also being able to heal better and make new circuits better so the idea is if you have a stroke and you injure a part of your brain like let's say you injure the part that moves say your right hand then those cells actually die but the brain can make new circuits around them and now we can see those circuits with some of our newer technologies and actually measure how they reform and how long it takes them to reform and which therapies help them do so better more effectively and again I guess a similar question this is very exciting research but when you can you offer some kind of timeline as to or end goal from here you're looking for 100 recovery from stroke or or what is your realistic ambition for the science well I think as a doctor and a scientist I want to cure everybody but we realize these are really difficult questions and part of what makes it science is its unpredictable nature we don't know the answer if we knew the answer then we could tell you oh it's going to take a year or it's going to take 10 years so that's one part to your question now we do have therapies we're hopeful about that we hope to be testing in the next few years so maybe within the next five or ten years we'll have a therapy your other question was sort of do we want to get it get everybody back completely or would it help to to help people a little bit and the answer is really every little bit helps so one of the major things about stroke is it's the leading cause of disability in the developed world and if you think about what it means to be disabled say if you take something like walking if you can't walk fast enough to cross the street before the light changes then you're really limited in what you can do and if I could increase your walking speed so you can cross the street then it's fine you can shuffle slowly the rest of the time or if you can't walk quickly enough to go to the bathroom that really disables you so if I if you can get fast enough that you can make it to the bathroom that I think a lot of patients would be very very happy with that even though they would love to be able to run again or do a marathon at least absolutely so a little bit would go a long way incremental benefits indeed now we hear a lot about the other vast you know ability of computing power and big data to to transform the research you're doing so I'm interested to know what are the what are the breakthrough technologies that are helping make this such an exciting area of research I guess also what are the challenges to what's what's preventing you from from accelerating your your research faster and developing the science at a faster clip so challenges first but also maybe maybe let's first start with you know what are the game changes how is how is the game changing well so definitely if we talk about the science of aging and longevity it's important to consider that aging is really assist the aging body is a system and in fact as I was discussing up there in the ideal lab Stanford is awesome as Marian also pointed out because it's part of the Silicon Valley so it has like all this access to technology and one technology that's really revolutionizing the the genetic genetic is like the as you say big data and ultra high throughput type of approach to the genome the epigenome the proteome the metabolome and all these are very important because for the first time we have the ability to probe in an unbiased manner rather than a biased specific manner we have the ability to probe unbiasedly the changes that occur with aging whether it's mutation whether it's just like changes in and how like the protein fold and etc so it's really really powerful and I think it's going to teach us a lot about an aging system so for us that's been a revolution and it's been great being at the epicenter of it at Stanford sure anything to add Marian obviously they're putting putting everybody together in as you are at Stanford is producing economies of scale if you were in terms of the the brain power of the scientists but what's what's changing or maybe what what are the big challenges facing you know further further breakthroughs or you know the the accelerating the work you're doing well like I was saying one of our biggest challenges is really understanding how people recover from stroke and so how we need to understand it before we can develop treatments to promote it and the big data approaches that you're asking about really help with that so we are just starting to recruit subjects so people who've had a stroke who want to help us understand how recovery happens and we're going to be gathering data from all kinds of devices standard clinical measures but also new devices made by our engineers that are part of our stroke research group to do things for example they're making bluetooth enabled devices so we can gather data in real time from people who are just moving around wherever they're at and so having the big data approaches to take all that data and put it together and say well what's really important like take walking speed if I'm measuring their walking speed how do the other factors relate that takes a lot of computing power it's a pretty complicated question it is a complicated question for a for a complicated subject but thank you very much both of you for for helping enlightening us and I wish you a successful annual meeting and and look forward to hearing and reading more about your research in the days months years to come thank you and thank you very much to our audience watching us online at weforum.org