Podcast – BNA Festival Roundup

Voice Over:

Welcome to the NIHR dementia research, a podcast brought to you by dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk, in association with Alzheimer’s Research UK and Alzheimer’s Society. Supporting early career dementia researchers across the world.

Professor Louise Serpell:

Hello, my name is Louise Serpell, and I’m really excited to be taking a turn at hosting the dementia research podcast today. Thank you all for tuning into this week’s show where my guests and I will be sharing highlights from this week’s British Neuroscience Association festival. For those listeners who don’t know me, I’m Professor of biochemistry and a director of Sussex Neuroscience at the university of Sussex and my research bridges neuroscience and biochemistry with a particular focus on protein misfolding and self-assembly. So within this podcast, I’m going to try not to completely dominate with all my exciting aspects of the BNA, which were about protein aggregation, looking at seeding and spreading in Alzheimer’s disease and other related diseases, particularly tauopathies. I really, really enjoyed the session on traumatic brain injury. That was amazing and really fantastic. Really interesting connection with what we know about dementia and what we might know about sports and so on. So I’ll try and fit in my own aspects, but what I first of all will do will be to let each of the guests that are here with me today introduce themselves. So I’m going to start off with Lilya.

Dr Lilya Andrianova:

Hi everyone. My name is Lilya Andrianova, and it’s my first ever podcast. So I’m quite excited and ever so slightly nervous. So I’m supposed to look at the Craig lab and we based at the University of Exeter at the moment, although I’m currently working for the University of Glasgow, as my lab was making a slow transition up to Glasgow. [inaudible 00:01:57] sort of in between and everywhere at once and also nowhere. I’m not really a dementia person per se myself. So the lab does focus on some aspects of dementia. But my project at the moment is just general, how things work in the brain and I work with animals. I’m a mass researcher and it’s sort of a circuit based approach. So I look at the long range projections, especially I’m interested in the interplay between prefrontal cortex hippocampus and the thalamus. So that’s me.

Professor Louise Serpell:

Fantastic. Thank you very much, Lilya. That is quite a long move. Isn’t it? One end of country to the other. Sarah, would you like to introduce yourself next?

Sarah Gregory:

Hi, I’m Sarah Gregory. I work in the Edinburgh dementia prevention group at the University of Edinburgh. I’m a part-time PhD student and I’m also a study coordinator in the group. For my PhD, I’m interested at looking at the risk that stress and hypothalamic pituitary, adrenal, or HPA axis abnormalities might play in meds and later life on your future development of Alzheimer’s disease. I’m using cohort studies to understand more about that topic and my study coordination job. I manage projects that are midlife adults or slightly older age adults who live without dementia, but maybe have risk factors and follow them up over time to understand more about how these risk factors play out.

Professor Louise Serpell:

So that’s really interesting that you’re doing a part-time PhD and also a job at the same time. That’s quite unusual. Great.

Sarah Gregory:

Yeah. It’s quite fun though to do, they’re kind of balanced together, so it works out quite well.

Professor Louise Serpell:

It must be sort of hard to, to decide what you’re going to do at each time, or was there a complication in terms of doing that or do you find it quite easy to split the tasks?

Sarah Gregory:

I did my masters part-time as well at UCL whilst I was working in a mental health trust on clinical trials. So I think I’m just used to multitasking and lots of diaries and calendars by now. So it works for me.

Professor Louise Serpell:

Sounds great. Thank you very much. So I’m going to go next to Slvia, who’s also at the University of Sussex with me. Silvia, do you want to say a bit about what you do?

Silvia Anderle:

Yeah, sure. Hello everyone. So I’m Silvia Anderle, I’m a second year PhD student, as Louise was saying, at the University of Sussex where I also did my undergrad in neuroscience, and then I moved to London to study a master in dementia at the Queen Square Institute of Neurology. But then after the master, I found out about this PhD opportunity and so I came back to Brighton where I am now. In my project, I investigate how physical exercise and the most common genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease, which is [inaudible 00:04:51] effect neurovascular coupling, which is the phenomenon by which a change in neural activity is matched by an increase in energy and oxygen supply to the blood. To do so, I record neuronal and vessel responses in vivo using mice that possess a human ape gene. And I link these to the amount of exercise that the mice do.

Professor Louise Serpell:

Okay. Thank you very much, Silvia. That’s fantastic. We’ll come back to you about neurovascular coupling later on. That would be great. Thank you. Emily, next, would you like to tell us a bit about yourself?

Emily Beswick:

Hi, my name’s Emily. I’m also in the second year of my PhD and I’m studying at the Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. I also did my undergraduate degree at Edinburgh. I did psychology. And after that, I went on to work at the Anne Rowling Regenerative Neurology Clinic, which is based here in Edinburgh and was set up by J K Rowling, after she lost her mother to complications from multiple sclerosis. So my work at the moment focuses on how we can support more people with motor neurone disease to get into clinical trials. We’re also looking at how we can use new digital health technologies to evaluate these motor symptoms and kind of look at how we can better assess the drugs and the clinical trials. I’m really on that concept of what is treatment in a clinical trial.

Professor Louise Serpell:

Thank you very much, Emily. That sounds fantastic. Lastly, but not least, Annika, would you like to tell us about yourself?

Dr Annika Boldt:

Hi Louis. Hi everyone. Thank you so much for having me. So my name’s Annika Boldt and I am a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow. I’m based at University College London at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. I’m actually an experimental psychologist by training and in my research, I investigate metacognition and metacognition for those of you who don’t know, it means thinking about your own thoughts. So it’s all of these little moments or signals in the brain. When we feel confident about something we’ve done, about a choice, when we detect errors in our own behavior. So this can be very low level and kind of more perceptual levels, or when we represent uncertainty in any way about our own beliefs. And I study these inside signals and the healthy human adult brain, and I use behavior paradigms like these button clicking tasks. I use F MRI and EEG and computational modeling.

Professor Louise Serpell:

Thank you very much Annika. So what I’m going to do next is I’d like to invite each one of my guests today to tell us a bit about the BNA conference. It ran from Monday to Thursday and there was a lot to engage in and enjoy. I’ll start with Lilya, if you could tell me what were your highlights of the meeting?

Dr Lilya Andrianova:

It was my first conference that was happening virtually, completely. It was on a special platform and you had all these extra bits and bobs for it. So you could message people. I don’t know if I’m really this excited about this, because this is my first personal one. So I’m completely sort of a novice coming into this, or maybe you guys have seen it in other conferences as well. And actually that’s kind of the norm now, but I thought it was really, quite handy to be able to find the people you’ve spoken to because I’m terrible with names. So I always end up speaking to people at posters and then never finding them again and never actually am able to make that connection. So I thought that was really great to be able to speak to people afterwards as well. In terms of highlights, all the sessions I thought were super interesting.

Dr Lilya Andrianova:

I’m still catching up on a lot of them just because there are too many happening at the same time that I couldn’t make, but luckily because they’re keeping the sessions up for, I think about four months. So yeah, I’m still very keen to attend a few more sessions. I think my favorite plenary lecture, was I think the Wednesday one and it was by, I do apologize if I butchered the name, Amita Sehga. She works in Drosophila and the lecture was on the glia cells and their involvement in sleep [inaudible], and actually started off with this amazing factoid that I feel everyone should know about, that drosophila flies, they are like human. They sleep at nighttime and they’re awake at daytime, but some of them, especially male ones like to take a siesta nap. If you take nothing else from that lecture, just that one bit, I think it’s a wonderful piece of a knowledge to have for everybody.

Professor Louise Serpell:

That’s fantastic. Thank you. I’s such a nice reference to our lives as well. Isn’t it? If I come to you next, Sarah, what did you enjoy the most about this meeting?

Sarah Gregory:

Yeah, I would definitely agree with Lylia that it was a really good platform. I’ve been to one other conference, I think, online. I just thought some of the networking stuff was actually really cool on this and it made it a lot easier for early career researchers to kind of ask questions and things. Whereas in a big hall, I might not go up to a microphone and ask. So I thought that was really good. I had quite a few that I was trying to choose from to speak about today. I think when it goes to prenatal exposure session and one thing I’ve really liked about the kind of breakout sessions was there was a real mixture of clinical studies and pre-clinical animal work and maybe kind of more data focused projects. It was really interesting to learn about it.

Sarah Gregory:

The one from that session that really stuck with me was Susanne de Rooij, who’s at the UMC in Amsterdam. She spoke about the Dutch famine birth cohort. So this is a group of people whose moms were pregnant during the famine in the Netherlands around, kind of, second world war time and the famine lasted for five to six months. But before and after the population was really well fed. So a really interesting group to study. So they had kind of over 2000 babies who were kind of in gestation before, during, and then after. The mum had at least 13 weeks where she had less than a thousand calories, and then they followed them up when they’re older, so they took 750 people when they were in their late fifties and looked to their cognitive function and the people whose moms had been pregnant with them during the famine, they did a lot worse on the street test compared to those babies whose moms were pregnant before or after the famine.

Sarah Gregory:

And then they looked at MRI scans 10 years later. So their late sixties, and they only found this in men, which was interesting, but the men whose moms were pregnant or in the famine and had lower brain volume, they had a higher brain age and they had reduced cerebral blood flow. So I just thought I was kind of a fascinating, really unique study in a country where you wouldn’t necessarily associate famine or nutritional deficits where they’ve been able to use this to understand what might be kind of the lifelong implications of this malnutrition during such an important development period. So that was a fascinating talk for me.

Professor Louise Serpell:

That’s really interesting. Embarrassingly, I am ignorant that I didn’t know that there was a famine in the Netherlands, and I wonder, you’d think during development that the brain would be prioritized and that you might think that it would be not affected by it a lack of nutrition, whereas maybe the rest of the body would be, but that’s really interesting that, that wasn’t the case. So fascinating and an unfortunate event that then leads to some really interesting research. Thank you very much, Sarah. So should we go next to Silvia? What did you enjoy the most? And I do encourage you to talk about the neurovascular coupling session, which I haven’t managed to watch yet, as well as whatever your highlight might be.

Silvia Anderle:

I also wanted to say that I also found this platform to be quite good for networking and for being able to connect with other people. And I think I was actually able to witness the power of actually doing these online conferences because I was able to connect with people that were literally on the other side of the world that were doing similar research to me. And I thought that was very nice compared to other conferences that I went to. And I didn’t really feel like I was connected with anyone. So I really liked this. And then of course, as you were saying, I should mention the neurovascular coupling session. And this was very, very interesting for me, obviously, because I do my research on neurovascular coupling and actually my supervisor, who is Dr. Katherine Hall. She was given one of the talks during the session and she was presenting about some findings from our lab, especially collected data from Dr.[inaudible 00:14:05] and that will be published soon.

Silvia Anderle:

And what we found is that there are some differences between the mouse visual cortex and hippocampus in terms of energy and oxygen supply. With the hippocampus showing lower blood flow and lower blood oxygenation, weaker neurovascular function and decreased expression of vascular markers indicated and therefore that the hippocampus might be more vulnerable to conditions such as hypoxia and neural damage. So of course this talk was quite interesting. Then there were also the other speakers that gave their amazing talks during the session. In particular, Dr. Claire Howard, from the University of Sheffield, she spoke about how in their lab, they managed to selectively activate and not enter neurons using optogenetics. And they saw that this activation leads to a large increase in vascular response in the area.

Silvia Anderle:

Although these neurons don’t really activate more, and this has implications in terms of the translation of the studies in humans, because we [inaudible 00:15:26] signal which is based on the vascular response to neuronal activation. If there are inter neurons that drive a major increase in vascular flow to the area, but it’s not linked to an increase in activity of the neurons. Then we have to take this into account. And then another very, very interesting talk was from Dr David Attwell from UCL who talked about their findings in the lab on parasites in Alzheimer’s disease. And for those of you who don’t know what parasites are, they are neural cells of the capillaries, which drive constriction and dilation in the capillary bed. And what they found is that in Alzheimer’s disease, mice, this parasites are constricted leading to a constriction of the capillaries.

Silvia Anderle:

And they also looked at the parasites in COVID 19 mice and what they saw actually in hamsters. So the parasites in COVID-19 capillaries are also constricted leading therefore to a decrease in the blood flow to the capillary bed. So he was basically saying that targeting this capillary constriction might be a therapeutic target for Alzheimer’s disease and also for the long term effects of COVID 19. So I think this was the take home message, and I thought it was very interesting.

Professor Louise Serpell:

Thank you very much. You are allowed to have other highlights as well, if you would like to introduce anything else. Of course, neurovascular coupling is going to be the most interesting thing for you, but was there anything else that you found to be really interesting or we can come back to you afterwards?

Silvia Anderle:

Yes, sure. It was a very interesting conference and there were so many relevant sessions that it was almost impossible to decide which one to attend to be fair. I think another session that was quite relevant for Alzheimer’s disease and which happened on the first day on the Monday, was the lived experience with dementia session. I don’t know if any of you saw it. And I thought it was a very, very powerful and moving session and very motivating for, for people like me that work and do research in Alzheimer’s disease. And this session was hosted by professor Nick Fox from the UCL DRI and basically was also co-hosted by Sophie [inaudible 00:18:21] who basically shared her experience of having a family history of familial Alzheimer’s disease. And she shared the story of how in her family everyone started to develop symptoms around the age of 40 and how there was a stigma associated with it.

Silvia Anderle:

So no one was really talking about it. Her mom was not talking about it or her nan and because of this, when her mom started having the first symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease at 40, she also initially refused to acknowledge what was happening. But then she said that when she was encouraged by her family members to actually head to Queen Square and learn more about what having familial Alzheimer’s disease implicates, that’s when her life changed and her way of seeing life changed. And since then she took part in a large number of cognitive tests, and she basically decided to collaborate as much as she could to better the understanding in familial Alzheimer’s disease. And then what I thought was also quite moving was when she talked about her experience of getting the genetic test, because initially she didn’t want to get tested because of the implications of getting the results back.

Silvia Anderle:

And if it was positive, it was going to change her life forever. And she has also daughters. So it had implications for her daughter. She talked about how initially she didn’t want to take the test and then her thinking behind it and how she reacted after she got the results of the test. And then finally, and then I’ll conclude, and I don’t want it to take up too much time. I think what was important for us as researchers was what she said was the take home message for the researchers watching the session. And she said that we have to remember that for every bit of data that we analyze and that we are so fully invested in, we have to remember that there are people that are fully invested in those data with their life. And that basically, even though maybe the clinical trials are not very encouraging at the moment, every little bit of data will go towards making life off people with Alzheimer’s disease better. And I think that was very, very important to hear, because I feel that sometimes we focus so much on the publication or maybe getting some rejections and we don’t actually remember that we are working to make the life of a lot of people better.

Professor Louise Serpell:

Thank you, Silvia. I’m really glad you brought that one up because I also saw that and I really enjoyed it. It was incredibly moving. There were a couple of things that really stood out for me where there was one point when she mentioned that she goes through all these tests, she does lumbar punctures and cognitive tests and things. And she said that her and her sort of support group, and there are lots of other people who she knows who were in a similar sort of position. And I think that’s really important having those support groups. She said that they really hate doing the cognitive tests when they have to test their memory. They find that really, really difficult. She said, I’d rather have a lumbar puncture than a cognitive test, which yeah, it’s pretty shocking to hear when you think actually it’s of course not invasive, but just having that sort of test and her sort of second guessing whether she’s got worse or better is just, must be incredibly difficult.

Professor Louise Serpell:

And I completely agree with you. I think it was really important to have that included in the BNA because I think to be reminded of why we’re working on what we’re working on is really, really helpful for us. And to be reminded of why we’re doing the science is in credit. You know, it’s not about prizes. Of course it is about us finding out new things and potentially making a difference, which I think is really important. So thank you really very much, Silvia. I’ll go next to Emily, if I may. And Emily, do you want to tell us a bit about what you enjoyed the most in the BNA meeting?

Emily Beswick:

Yeah, of course. We’ve all said it’s all been kind of a lot to choose from and definitely a lot of catching up to do, but too much choice. So that was a good thing. So a lecture that I found probably the most interesting to me was the one that kicked off the whole thing. So we started off with the brain resilience to pathology, which was shared by [inaudible 00:23:27]. And then my particular favorite within that one was by Professor Bray from Cambridge, who then presented their work from the medical research council on the cognitive agent study. So this was a population based narrow pathology study involved in 550 brain donations, but they’d also got some questionnaire and live data from these people before they passed away from dementia. I said, I found this particularly interesting because to me it kind of defined to me what a good science talk is.

Emily Beswick:

It had a good story or had a good, clear objective. And we also had some kind of little bits of extra knowledge and also some very clear testable hypotheses. And then the results of that, we could say how it would have implications in the future. So we started off by looking at how dementia had changed over time. So we looked a little bit at how the population-based registers were informed and it was about how incidents and prevalence have changed over time, because there’s quite a lot of narrative about, you know, there’s an aging population, dementia is increasing, we need to be concerned. Whereas actually, when we started looking at the data on professors explaining it quite well of how the population is aging, actually the rate sustained kind of similar which I thought was quite interesting, cause it does dispel that kind of method. You know, we’re all going to get dementia, that kind of problem.

Emily Beswick:

But while still expressing that it is a population based problem. And we also went on to think a bit more about the medical research council study itself. So we presented two hypotheses, which again were very clear, very testable. So first of all, we looked at the pathology in the brain. So the variable was higher education. So what is higher education, but able to compensate the pathological burden of dementia. So was it neuroprotective, including the less pathology in the brain or would it also be that they were better able to cope with pathology that was existing this concept of compensation? So I found it quite helpful to consider that as two separate hypotheses and also see how they’re testable and how they were disproved. So the study found that there was no evidence of neuroprotection. So the pathology in these two individuals, hypothetical group A, hypothetical group B, were similar.

Emily Beswick:

So having a higher education did not stop the changes in pathology in the brain. However, the clinical manifestation was less severe. So this does have big implications for when we’re talking to patients in clinic. So this lower education, these two hypothetical patients may be presenting with similar levels of pathological burden, but it’s about how they can cope with that pathological burden. Thinking about that reserve, that cognitive reserve, that resilience to pathology, which I thought was very interesting. And then we also thought about how this has implications for policy, which I think was very good and well done in the talk. Didn’t overreach, she explained it very clearly. This is something that we can change. Education is a modifiable risk factor. As a society, we have a responsibility to change those modifiable responses, even if it’s not the only risk factor, what have we got to lose? We can always improve things like that. I think that was definitely my highlight of the tops.

Professor Louise Serpell:

Thanks very much, Emily. It sounds fascinating. I didn’t hear that one. So thank you very much. It was a really good assessment of that. also think you, you may have gone to the ECR career networking, what they called speed dating [crosstalk 00:27:22] And I think Sarah did too. Emily, do you want to start and then I’ll come to Sarah and then I’ll finally go to Annika.

Emily Beswick:

Yeah, of course. I had a really good experience with that. I would definitely say that was a highlight for me as [inaudible 00:27:36] And it was having been to quite a few virtual conferences, that was a really unique opportunity and it can be quite intimidating to just approach people and also not really know where to start with what jobs people do and things like that. So as I’m in secondary for PhD in science, look ahead, what do I want to do? What do I want to do careers wise? So I was really excited about the opportunity to have these short little speed dating sessions, just one to one, well, two to one of two researches. It kind of depended, but mine was a PI and an industry researcher. I spoke to them, it’s a very informal environment.

Emily Beswick:

It’s just a chat. We heard a little bit more about what they did on a day to day, kind of lifted that veil of what do you actually do in your job. And what I found was it was nice to get that little bit of honesty of being like, there’s parts that I struggle with, there’s parts I enjoy. What do you like doing as a person and think about how your career can fit into that. And then on the people that I spoke to were just absolutely lovely, and we’ve already emailed with additional questions and support and advice. So thank you for the mentorship.

Professor Louise Serpell:

It sounds really good. And something you would think that would be a good thing to keep including in these sorts of conferences.

Emily Beswick:

Yes, definitely. It would be something I would recommend because it’s just nice to have that little mentorship role outside of your group. And particularly we’re talking to industry researchers, when you work in academia, that’s just not really as easy today.

Professor Louise Serpell:

Yeah, absolutely. And of course the arts academics, that’s sort of bias because we don’t have any experience of anything else really sort of narrow and we don’t know how to do anything else, essentially. So, and Sarah, how did you find that session?

Sarah Gregory:

Same as Emily, I thought they were so useful and I would love to see them at this conference again and at more conferences I chose to industry people because I felt like I know a little bit about the academic path, through people kind of in our group, or I would maybe know a little bit more about who I could go and ask about, okay, how would you get to this position? So I spoke to someone who was in research and development in a company and someone who is in the charity sector. And it was just so interesting to hear about that part of, kind of why they made the decision to go out of academia. They had PhDs, they had completed the varying levels of postdocs before deciding to move on the kind of skillsets that you’re building up to that have really, really valued by industry, and what a job outside of academia might look like and what opportunities are there. And both of them were kind of saying you’re not leaving science if you leave academia. We’re still at these conferences, you just do it in a different way. You’re engaging in a different way. So it was just fascinating to learn about different opportunities are out there once the PhD is finished and you’re looking for other opportunities.

Professor Louise Serpell:

Thank you very much, Sarah. That was fantastic. Really interesting. I could have done with that myself, I think. I’m going to come next to Annika and Annika gave a talk at the conference. So I’m going to encourage her to talk a bit about what she talked about and also to give her highlights. So Annika, what would you like to tell us about?

Dr Annika Boldt:

I might start off telling you a bit more about the symposium I coach co-chaired. This was actually the first time for me to invite my own speakers for symposium. I did this together with a colleague and friend Lucy Childs. Who’s also at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL and we hosted the dynamics of decision-making and medical session on Monday afternoon, which was kindly sponsored by the Experimental Psychology Society, the EPS and it has been a really good experience. I must say, I wish I’d done this sooner. Imagine me picking my favorite speakers for a talk. It’s a bit like kid in a candy shop. You just go around your papers or your emails and you just start contacting people, asking them to come. And this is one of these moments where COVID has been a bit of a silver lining because we had one speaker whom we really wanted to invite.

Dr Annika Boldt:

Who in an initial round, when we are still thinking this conference would go ahead and Brighton said, no, he couldn’t fly across the globe. And then when we knew it was online, we contacted him again and said, look, we don’t want to put you on a spot, but your excuse is kind of invalid now. So would you like to come and talk? And he said yes. So that’s been amazing. What we wanted to do is bring some experts together on a slightly new view on the mental cognition research. So sampling or dynamic view on decision-making is quite common in the literature. So nowadays the decision models that most people use are models that assume that evidence gets accumulated over time in the brain. For example, you make a choice, whether a traffic light is red or green you’re going to accumulate information until it is sufficient.

Dr Annika Boldt:

And you can say it’s green, for example. Confidence in the history of [inaudible 00:33:00], research has been probably seen as a little more static measure, but this is changing. Recently people start to think about the same kind of frameworks when they think about how confident people are, how they detect their own mistakes. We really like this flexible view on our field and our questions. So we wanted to host a symposium that focuses on that. And by flexibility, I mean, both in terms of situations, like how does the brain adopt different biases depending on what choice context I’m in or decision-making conference context, but also within a single decision what are the evidence sources to sample from when I say how sure I am that I answered a question correctly, for example. Including ourselves, we had two other speakers.

Dr Annika Boldt:

So we started off our hearing a talk from my co-chair Lucy Childs. She talked about a really neat framework of hers where she explained how people tend to adopt different confidence biases. So confidence bias is a tendency to be over or under confident. Then next Brian Maniscalco from University of California, Irvine, presented some really elegant work where he links cognitive findings to low level brain implementation. To me it’s low level, to some of you might not be lower level. In this case he explained how choices are often based on a balanced review of the available evidence, whereas for confidence, it’s different very often. People disregard or discard some of the things they know, some of the evidence they have accumulated, and he links this to tuned inhibition.

Dr Annika Boldt:

In other words, in his model, choices are being read out from neuron populations that receive more input from each other. So they have more tuned inhibition and therefore they represent something like an average evidence and confidence instead is more focused on the absolute evidence. So it’s from neuron populations that have less tuned inhibition. Very interesting work and it links very nicely to a consistent finding from the literature, that confidence tends to be based on decision congruent evidence. So people have a bit of a confirmation bias. Then my talk came on and I find exactly the opposite and my data. So I was a bit bold and chose to present these findings directly after Brian, I told him in advance. We had a really good discussion about why I might be finding the exact opposite thing in my data and nine data sets very consistently.

Dr Annika Boldt:

We’re thinking about some future works and how to disentangle this further. And then finally we had some really interesting non-human primate data from Chris Fetsch from Baltimore, John Hopkins. And it’s quite tricky to do metacognition research in monkeys, as you might imagine. So very often people use these clever opt out paradigms where when the monkey is unsure, it’s taught to not respond at all but there’s some disadvantages to this and Chris’s lab is really great at replacing these paradigms with more explicit confidence ratings. So the monkey is taught to say how sure or unsure they are by making a [inaudible 00:36:46]. Chris was showing some really interesting data that showed that a signal that could be interpreted as a population code for uncertainty. See, I really enjoyed co-chairing that with Lucy. That was also one of my highlights, I must say.

Professor Louise Serpell:

I can really underline the fun in organizing a symposium, it really is fun and I really encourage everybody to do that because people you know, and people that you’ve enjoyed their talks it’s really, really entertaining. And then you make basically your own perfect symposium that every single tool will be fascinating for you. So it’s great fun. Annika, was there anything else that you wanted to highlight that you enjoyed?

Dr Annika Boldt:

Maybe I’d take this opportunity to speak about a more method spaced session I went to because I always tried to do this when I go to conferences as a researcher, more interested in fundamental science. I tried to go to developmental talk, to clinical, to a method space just to sample a little bit. And the methods one I went to was the R workshop on Monday morning. I’m an R user myself. You could call me almost a religious R user. So I skipped the earlier talks about introduction to R but at the end, I think the last two talks, one was held by,[inaudible 00:38:16] and he showed how R could be used for multi-varied statistics and I must admit, I still use MATLAB for my multi-varied analysis, I really want to move away from that.

Dr Annika Boldt:

So that was a really good kind of pointer. He introduced a package called Levon, which to me, it sounded a bit like a Swiss army knife of our statistics. So I’m going to look into that for sure. And then the last talk was by Rik Henson from University of Cambridge and he explained how R could be used for Bayesian analysis. I already do that a lot in my research, I use R for Bayesian stats, but what I really liked was that he presented a financial argument for why you should use bayesian statistics, which was a simulation for a fictional [inaudible 00:39:08] experiment. And he showed how the costs were dropping as soon as you adopted a Bayesian sampling approach. That is of course, very convincing.

Professor Louise Serpell:

Thank you very much, Annika. I think the methods ones are really useful in particular for sort of just helping us to understand the experts in those fields. And often those sorts of people are working away, avidly doing all of the methods development stuff, and don’t necessarily get to talk about their work very often because it’s not going to, perhaps, get into nature and so on. So it was really important to give those sorts of people a platform. I think so. Yeah, really good. Good suggestions. So I just wanted to talk about my favorite talk, which was a plenary lecture by [inaudible 00:39:58]. He was talking about amyloids and tau in Alzheimer’s disease and I followed his work for a long time because he works on [inaudible 00:40:05] processing and that’s something I’m really interested in.

Professor Louise Serpell:

I’d heard him speak before about amyloid beta as a target for therapy and how drug companies shouldn’t abandon it because potentially some of the drugs that they have actually produced may well work. It’s just that people aren’t being treated early enough. He showed some really interesting work where he has been working with human cells that human neurons implanted into an animal model so that he could look at Alzheimer’s disease in humans, but using an animal model of which I guess perhaps the popular news press might have a problem with, but it’s a really exciting initiative and at the end of the talk, he was talking about how they were going to introduce microglia as well. So human microglia with human neurons and just a really innovative, interesting way of looking at Alzheimer’s disease.

Professor Louise Serpell:

He showed some really nice data that suggested that amyloid beta, it’s sort of supported views that people had talked about before where amyloid beta plaques seem to initiate the aggregation of tau. So being able to show that in a sort of temporal manner. It sort of helps to explain that famous nun study. I don’t know if any of you know about this, but it’s always brought up as the idea to underline why amyloid beta isn’t important because there were nuns who had died and didn’t have any dementia, but were shown to have lots and lots of amyloid. And then people who had dementia, then they didn’t show lots of amyloid. So there didn’t seem to be a good correlation essentially between the pathology and the level of dementia. What he showed here was that people can have amyloid or the model system can have amyloid, and in some model systems, you get tau aggregation and some you don’t.

Professor Louise Serpell:

So it really seemed to be about the body’s response to the amyloid deposition rather than necessarily the amyloid itself. So I think that’s fascinating, thinking about how the body responds in terms of inflammation, in terms of other sort of misfolding and so on. It just seemed really exciting. And I sort of want to add one thing, which comes from my experience of imposter syndrome just before I move on, which is that, listening to this talk by [inaudible 00:42:40] really made me think that perhaps I should give up doing science and just let him do it because he was really amazing. Then I let a day or two go by and instead of feeling like that anymore, I now just feel inspired to carry on working on it in my own little niche area of it and hopefully contribute something. So however small in the whole scheme of everything. On that note, I will now move on to Lilya. Do you want to tell us if you were going to suggest to somebody, what you would really recommend that they watched in the BNA alongside, perhaps the things you’ve already highlighted, what would you pick?

Dr Lilya Andrianova:

I think, just to follow on from what you were talking about and improving on our current models for dementia and using both animals as models and adding human cells and sort of trying to make a better model to actually study Alzheimer’s for example. I’ll tie it in with what I would recommend for people to do and that’s something I’m going to go back and do myself, is look through all the posters again and make use of the messenger system that we still have to see if I can still chat to the people who presented because as it always happens for me, symposia and plenary lectures are super interesting and really fun but that sort of one on one or small group talking that you end up having when you’re at a poster session, I think can be just as stimulating, just as interesting to you as a researcher.

Dr Lilya Andrianova:

I went to one of the posters by a colleague that works, I think, at UCL and their work is with ferrets. It’s sort of a lecture on Physiology, so up my street. They were comparing ferrets with rats and there’s quite a lot of difference and we sort of ended up having a super long chat about species specific things and how, as with most diseases, we need better models for things and especially so with dementia, seeing as the clinical trials aren’t overly promising. At the moment it’s possibly because we haven’t quite found the best models. I think my take home message from my interaction was that as researchers we end up a little bit stuck in our ways, so you sort of get trained in a set of techniques and you think this is what I do. So I primarily work with rodents, that’s my go to. Well, that’s what I do. It’s quite inspiring to look at what other species and what other science can be done using other models and to be able to think about whether or not your techniques are actually best placed to answer the questions you’re posing for yourself.

Dr Lilya Andrianova:

I think that goes back to what Louise was saying, that we need to almost think outside of the box for the future experiments. I think that would be my advice to anyone, look at all the posters and also look at the things that you wouldn’t normally think you’d go to, just because you think perhaps they aren’t quite exactly what you do but sometimes I think it’s the best thing. Go to the thing that seems most distant to what you’ve done and you’ll definitely find some commonalities there.

Professor Louise Serpell:

Thank you, Lilya. That’s really important because we haven’t mentioned any posters yet. It’s probably the part that I really miss about having an online meeting because what I tend to do at posters is wander around and then get people to explain their poster to me. I find reading them quite tricky, especially if you’re sort of standing there with all of your stuff and everything. I think I really miss that and I haven’t quite got to the stage where I feel like online I’m really able to look at the posters in an effective way. So I think having them highlighted is a great way. Actually, there was flash presentation[crosstalk 00:47:25]

Professor Louise Serpell:

Did you do one of those as well, Emily?

Emily Beswick:

Yeah, just the little data blitz session.

Professor Louise Serpell:

I think they’re really helpful because people like me are just rushing about, trying to do everything at once and just having that little snippet is really helpful. I think what people remarked about that was that the presentations were such high quality, really impressive, I think Silvia did one as well. Didn’t you, Silvia?

Silvia Anderle:

Yes, I did.

Professor Louise Serpell:

You managed to get into such a short amount of time, a huge amount of work. Of course. And it’s an opportunity to highlight what you’ve done. I think that’s really helpful. Did any of you get any sort of feedback from that? Did anyone come to your posters because they’d seen your flash talk? I think those work well in a real environment because people can come up to you at coffee and have a chat about your flash talk. Lilya do you want to say something and then I’ll go to Silvia?

Dr Lilya Andrianova:

My actual presentation was on Wednesday, but the [inaudible 00:48:32]talks were at the start of the conference, so I had a few questions coming in on Monday and actually I ended up meeting up with one or two people before my poster presentation [inaudible 00:48:43] So I think it was really useful for more people to see your stuff.

Professor Louise Serpell:

So you definitely do those when the opportunity occurs?

Dr Lilya Andrianova:

Absolutely, yeah. Of course I was a bit worried because, you know, presenting. I think most scientists aren’t really that comfortable presenting at any given opportunity, so we’re all a little unsure. I sort of had to push myself through, but I think those are great and even if you’re scared of doing it, you should just say yes anyway.

Professor Louise Serpell:

Silvia, did you get some responses?

Silvia Anderle:

Yes. As Lilya was saying, I think that because of the rapid presentation, a lot of people must have watched than those that were interested in my research. Probably decided to come to the poster because I also had some people that emailed me on the Monday. So, yes I think it’s a good opportunity.

Professor Louise Serpell:

Great. I think that we probably are running out of time. What I’m going to do is come to each one of you and get you to mention what would you recommend if somebody doesn’t have very much time and they’ve just got to quickly dip in to BNA? And I’m going to go in a different direction now cause I’m going to come to Annika first.

Dr Annika Boldt:

This is really difficult, there are so many highlights but I think, if I could name only one thing, it would be [inaudible 00:50:27] talk. I don’t know whether anybody else saw this, it was very interesting. It was a [inaudible 00:50:35] mid-career prize lecture. It was a very interesting summary of all the great work that she has done to this day. It was a really nice mixture of fundamental research and then also the translational aspects, so up to clinical studies, she showed a really lovely finding of stroke patients who underwent anodal tDCS. So brain stimulation and they ended up with lasting benefits to their rehabilitation journey. It’s very nice to tie all these things together. She does that so brilliantly.

Professor Louise Serpell:

Thank you very much, Annika. Emily, what would you recommend?

Emily Beswick:

I think my final comment would definitely be focused on the posters aspect. One thing that I found that was really interesting and unique about the BNA conference was that you could submit a pre-registration poster. We decided to do that, it was accepted. We did it for the data blitz so you give a short summary of the study that you’re currently running at the moment, so we brought our factors that impact trial participation in motor neurone disease. This kind of study is ideal for the pre-registration environment. We’re studying a cohort, and then we’re waiting twelve months to come back and look at the date. In this case, looking at did they participate in a clinical trial? This is something that I really liked about the pre-registration, you can read work that is happening right now. A benefit of conference is generally that you’re finding out about research that’s just happened, but you can go even more recent in the pre-registration. So you’re finding out what’s actually being done. Finding out what the new developments are, finding out what this preliminary data is without that time delay that we often have from academic publishing.

Professor Louise Serpell:

I hadn’t actually heard about that. That’s really fascinating. Have you had people come back to you about the pre-registration? Or do you think that’s something people will be really excited about the next BNA because they’ll get to hear the results.

Emily Beswick:

I don’t think it was taken up on as much as I thought it would be. When I was looking through the posters, I was quite surprised that there weren’t more pre-registration. People were tending to lean towards the traditional format of publishing before they’d done a manuscript. Yeah, I thought that was a really interesting opportunity. Especially with bench work science. You’re looking at something almost in real time, which is very interesting.

Professor Louise Serpell:

Maybe it’s going to take a little bit of time for people to get used to the idea of it. Silvia, is there something that you would like to highlight, if people had a short amount of time to look at BNA?

Silvia Anderle:

I’m just going to highlight quickly two sessions. The first one is not a science session per se, but it was a session called steps towards decolonizing, teaching and learning in neuroscience. I thought it was really relevant and one of the speakers was the associate Professor, [inaudible 00:53:48]from the University of Nottingham. She explained the frame work that her and her colleague created for the steps to follow to start this decolonizing approach of academia. This frame work is available for everyone in science to take up. Basically, it consists of four major steps, so it’s changing the teaching material, making sure that the teaching material is inclusive and that you don’t use, for example, knowledge that came from [inaudible 00:54:34] that were done back in the day that were racist because maybe they used participants that were not ethically taking part in the study.

Silvia Anderle:

The choice of teaching material is really important. Also, knowledge production. So who is giving the lectures and make sure to involve as many teachers, lecturers that are from diverse backgrounds. The history of the subject, as I was saying, making sure that the research you are teaching were ethically achieved, and then tackling the current inequalities. Teaching the students not just about racism, but also what microaggressions are. There are way more details to this that I encourage everyone to look up, but the good thing is that this frame work is available for all other Universities to actually take up and apply.

Silvia Anderle:

Indeed, there was also Professor[inaudible 00:55:56] from the University of Sussex, that was explaining how at Sussex we are taking steps towards this. Also, there was associate Professor Becky Trueman from University of Nottingham, who was also saying how they are using this framework and applying it to teach neuroscience at University of Nottingham. I think this session was really relevant. Then just briefly, I wanted to mention the session that was on Wednesday about non neuronal cells in neurological disease. I thought that was very interesting because I think that sometimes we focus a lot of our attention on neurons, but as Louise was saying, glia cells play a very important role. I encourage everyone to go and watch this session because all the talks are very interesting. I really recommend it.

Professor Louise Serpell:

Thank you very much, Silvia.

Professor Louise Serpell:

So, Sarah.

Sarah Gregory:

Very weirdly, I was basically just going to echo what Emily had said. Resilience to pathology was the other session that I was deciding between as my highlight. I’d definitely recommend checking that one out. I thought all of the talks in that were so interesting, but particularly the one by Professor Carole Brayne and then the pre-registration posters as well. We’d submitted a pre-registration poster looking at our speech study to collect data remotely over the phone, to see if speech might be a biomarker of Alzheimer’s disease. [inaudible 00:57:46] Maybe what Emily’s already said and recommended. I think those would be my two highlights from the [inaudible 00:57:53]

Professor Louise Serpell:

Fantastic. Thank you very much. I just want to mention a couple of things that I very much enjoyed. There was a session on Thursday, it was about dementia spots and traumatic brain injury, which I thought was fascinating. It was run entirely by clinicians, so it had been set up by David Sharp, who I think was running the session with William Stewart, Eliza [inaudible 00:58:16], and Neil Graham. They all talked about their work looking at the outcome of traumatic brain injury and showing that relatively small knocks to the head can have quite a severe impact. They were looking at how we might be able to diagnose that in terms of rugby players, for example, who’ve had mild bumps. I’m not talking about a concussion, but bumps and they can look at the level of neurofilament light in the blood. Also, the formation of phosphorylated tau, and so on. And talking about the impact of that in terms of how we make sport safer. I thought really fascinating.

Professor Louise Serpell:

Early on Monday when there were three sessions all at the same time that I wanted to go to, I went to protein spread and seeding. One of the speakers was [inaudible 00:59:22] from [inaudible 00:59:23] France. They were talking essentially about how different proteins in disease spread throughout the brain and trying to understand that in a bit more detail. It was a really well put together session because it had tau, it had [inaudible 00:59:41] and then it had prion. Prion is obviously sort of the model for trying to understand how seeding works and the suggestion that you can have infection between individuals, but of course what we’re talking about here is spreading within the brain of an individual and looking at how that transmission of protein misfolding happens between cell to cell and spreads throughout the brain. Really interesting.

Professor Louise Serpell:

I think I’m going to draw to a close here and I just want to thank everyone who came today for sharing. If you attended this conference and missed any of the talks, I hope that we’ve highlighted some of them and you can go and watch them on catch up. But, if you didn’t book and can’t access those presentations, I hope that our summaries today have been interesting and given you a bit of pause for thought. Some other things you might want to go ahead and look up. I’m sure if you take a look at Twitter, with the hashtag #BNA2021, you will find lots of discussion and pictures of the posters that you missed. It’s time to end today’s podcast recording. I’d just really like to thank our panelists, Sarah Gregory, Silvia Anderle, Emily Beswick, Dr Lilya Andrianova, and Dr Annika Boldt for their participation today. There are profiles of all of today’s panelists on the website, including details of their Twitter accounts and thank you all for listening and please remember to like, comment and subscribe and tell us about your own work. Thank you all very much.

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