I think this is a clear example of what happens when research falls into a gap between traditional funding priorities.
Faye McKenna, a neuroscientist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine who has published in Nature and Molecular Psychiatry, wants to do something that sounds like it should already exist: map how standard blood inflammation markers (easily ordered by your doctor) actually connect to what's happening inside the brain at the tissue level (microglia activation, iron deposition, free water changes). At a population scale, comparing autoimmune disease patients to the general population.
This data doesn't exist yet. We know inflammation damages the brain. We don't have a systematic map of how the inflammatory markers in your blood relate to the neuroinflammation we can see on brain imaging.
It feels like in the future this information should be easily and routinely checked when visiting your doctor.
https://www.researchhub.com/proposal/32208/we-know-inflammation-damages-the-brain-nobody-has-actually-mapped-how
2 Comments
This post is about the future of science funding. A peer-reviewed research proposal by a credentialed neuroscientist (published in Nature, based at Albert Einstein College of Medicine) is being publicly funded through ResearchHub because no traditional funding body has picked it up. The study would create a foundational dataset for understanding neuroinflammation that could inform future interventions for neurodegenerative diseases. The broader trend of scientists turning to open crowdfunding platforms when traditional grants don’t cover their research questions has implications for how neuroscience and medical research get prioritized. Even more now that research funding is being cut dramatically.
This is one of those areas where everyone agrees it matters, but the mechanisms are still fuzzy. If they can actually map cause and effect, not just correlation, that’s huge. Curious how they deal with variability though, inflammation isn’t exactly consistent across people or even over time.