Photo: Brain health researcher Dr. Lara Boyd
Call it the ultimate brain trust. At UBC's new Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health, more than 250 researchers from the fields of neurology, neuroscience and psychiatry are working together to solve the world’s greatest mystery: the human brain.
Bridging basic science and clinical care in a state-of-the-art facility, the Centre provides opportunities for education, collaboration, and interaction with patients from across BC. The Centre is the largest and most comprehensive brain care and research centre in Canada, and is a partnership of the UBC Faculty of Medicine, Vancouver Coastal Health, and Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute.
Under the leadership of co-directors Dr. Brian MacVicar and Dr. Jon Stoessl, the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health is poised to move research from the bedside to the bench and back again, in order to understand disease and translate research into better patient care and therapies.
“Interaction is key for us,” says Dr. MacVicar of the collaborative nature of the Centre. “We want scientists and clinicians working together, sitting down to talk about the possibilities out there, learning about each other's constraints, and talking about crazy ideas. We need the crazy ideas to challenge dogmas in brain science and come up with new solutions.”
The good news is that it’s working. The Centre’s unique approach is helping UBC to recruit some of the world’s leading scientists, and is providing students with unprecedented experience in collaboration that could change the future of medicine. That’s welcome news given that brain disease is on its way to becoming Canada’s leading cause of death: it already affects one in three Canadians and costs the economy more than $30 billion a year.
The centre is home to clinics that investigate and treat virtually every kind of brain illness and injury, from Parkinson’s, ALS, Multiple Sclerosis, Huntington’s and Alzheimer’s, to concussion, addiction and mental health.
It’s a hub for researchers such as Dr. Lara Boyd, a neuroscientist and physical therapist who holds the Canada Research Chair in Neurobiology of Motor Learning. Boyd’s multidisciplinary team in the Brain Behaviour Lab is successfully curbing the effects of stroke through early intervention and innovative treatments that stimulate healthy parts of the brain to take over lost functions.
“The Centre’s integrated approach has been critical to my lab’s success,” says Boyd. “Solving problems such as strokes requires research from multiple angles. It’s making connections and leveraging information that we share—drugs and therapies—to maximize solutions.”
“The discoveries taking place at the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health offer unprecedented insights into how brain disruption is caused in neurological and psychiatric diseases,” says Dr. Stoessl. “The interaction and innovation at this Centre give us hope for innovative therapies in the future. The advances researchers and clinicians are making at this Centre will improve lives and impact society in ways that we are only now beginning to see.”
Co-directors of the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health, Dr. Brian MacVicar and Dr. John Stoessl, discuss what is being done to prevent brain disease becoming the leading cause of death in Canada by 2020.
See more discussion between Drs.MacVicar and Stoessl
Watch Lara Boyd talk about the impact of her work
The Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health represents a partnership between Vancouver Coastal Health and the Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia. The centre was made possible with a generous donation from Dr. Djavad Mowafaghian as well as contributions from other philanthropists and leaders, as well as those of the federal and provincial governments.
The federal Research Support Fund enables the maintenance of research facilities such as the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health at UBC and its affiliated hospitals.