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Every feeling in our body, from a pang of hunger to a wave of nausea to a jolt of pain, stems from a constant dialogue between our body and brain. This crosstalk is so subtle that we remain largely unaware of it, yet it involves a complex cascade of signals that unfolds across virtually all organs and systems in the body.
At Harvard Medical School, researchers have been working to decode how this brain-body communication works and the ways it can go awry.
Now, a $30 million gift from philanthropist Lisa Yang to Harvard University is propelling these efforts by establishing the K. Lisa Yang Brain Body Center at HMS. The center will bring together experts from diverse disciplines to illuminate the mysteries of brain-body signaling and train the next generation of researchers.
“This extraordinary gift will supercharge our efforts to unravel one of biology’s greatest mysteries: how the brain and body communicate to keep us healthy,” says HMS Dean George Q. Daley, AB ’82, MD ’91, PhD. “It is an investment that will spark discoveries, foster collaboration, and train the scientists who will lead the field into the future.”
The center is part of the Yang Tan Collective, which includes six research centers at MIT and two at HMS. The collective brings together top scientists and fellows—postdoctoral researchers, PhD candidates, and graduate students—in a focused, collaborative community that aims to turn fundamental discoveries into solutions that improve quality of life. Scientists at the new HMS center will collaborate with peer researchers at the sister K. Lisa Yang Brain-Body Center at MIT.
The gift will unify the efforts of scientists across different laboratories and institutions to study brain-body communication and physiology in health and disease.
David Ginty
“Our goal is to understand how different body systems are represented in the brain, and in turn, how the brain coordinates the functioning of these systems,” says center co-director David Ginty, PhD, the Edward R. and Anne G. Lefler Professor and chair of the Department of Neurobiology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS. “The gift will unify the efforts of scientists across different laboratories and institutions to study brain-body communication and physiology in health and disease.”
Yang adds: “Even the most brilliant research on individual organ systems can’t capture the whole human body—a marvel of biology, chemistry, and physics, guided by brain circuits that we barely understand. I hope the combined expertise of the Harvard and MIT Brain-Body Centers will fast-track this understanding and bring us closer to treatments for chronic diseases.”
Collaboration around brain-body communication
In recent years, scientists have become increasingly interested in how body-brain communication plays out across various organs and systems. But the field has suffered from a lack of collaboration among scientists studying different aspects of this process, says Mark Andermann, PhD ’06, an investigator at the new center.
“The field of brain-body communication is exploding, but what’s missing are concerted collaborations that bring multiple labs together — it’s been hard to establish a critical mass of close collaborators,” says Andermann, a professor of medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and a professor of neurobiology at HMS.
This is where the new center comes into play. Housed within the neurobiology department, the center will bring together scientists with deep expertise in the physiology of the brain and organ systems. These scientists will collaborate internally and work externally with investigators at MIT’s sister center, which has pioneered novel tools and approaches for studying brain-body communication.
The HMS center was established with a $10 million endowment, plus another $10 million in research funds to be used within five years. An additional $10 million endowment will provide fellowships and support for PhD students and postdocs interested in the field of brain-body communication.
Core investigators include Andermann and Ginty, as well as co-director Michael Greenberg, PhD, the Nathan Marsh Pusey Professor of Neurobiology; Chenghua Gu, PhD, professor of neurobiology; Stephen Liberles, AB ’94, AM ’96, PhD ’00, professor of cell biology; and Dragana Rogulja, PhD, associate professor of neurobiology.
Sustained funding in an uncertain time
The investigators agree that in a time of uncertainty around federal funding for research, there’s an ever greater need for new ways to sustain critical research on basic biological mechanisms—the type of science that has historically yielded the most transformative treatments.
The researchers hope that together, their projects will provide a more holistic understanding of brain-body communication—and in the process, can illuminate the underlying mechanisms of diseases that occur when this communication breaks down.
“The sky is the limit for deciphering the nature of communication between the body and the brain and identifying opportunities for improving the human condition,” Ginty says. “This new gift will catalyze our efforts to do so.”