Associate professor Jørgen Afseth Sugar at the Department of Molecular Medicine at the Institute of Basic Medical Sciences is delighted with the news that he and his team have been awarded 22 million from the Research Council of Norway.
The associate professor says that he has been through a roller coaster ride the last two years. Sugar spent an extreme amount of time working on the application he wrote to the European Research Council (ERC). He made it through the entire process, was interviewed by the ERC and was top-rated. Then there was a huge disappointment when he ended up without funding.
“The Research Council of Norway has introduced a trial scheme where they finance two projects a year that have been top-rated without receiving funding. They drew lots between five applications that had been top-rated. Our project TOTAL RECALL was one of the two that was awarded this funding. This is extremely important for the research environment that we are working to build. We can employ more people, buy and use equipment, and not least do we get the opportunity to establish new and unique technology in Norway”, says Sugar.
Inspiration for everyone who puts in a lot of effort in the work with ERC applications
Both Pro-Dean for Research and Innovation Jan Bjaalie at the Faculty of Medicine and Head of Institute Philippe Collas at IMB are delighted with the award.
“This is a significant award from the Research Council in one of the most competitive arenas. It's also an inspiration to everyone who puts a lot of effort into the work on ERC applications. The faculty congratulates Jørgen Sugar and the entire research environment,” says Bjaalie.
“This is great news. Congratulations to Sugar and his research group. I am proud on behalf of IMB”, says Collas.
Some people lose the ability to create new memories
The brain forms and remembers so-called episodic memories, such as what happened, where and when. But we still know too little about how this fundamentally important function of the brain actually works, explains Sugar.
The ability to relive an event that happened in a specific place at a specific time depends on a part of the temporal lobe. If this part of the brain is damaged, the ability to create new episodic memories is lost. This happens, among other things, with epilepsy that affects the temporal lobe. With this type of epilepsy, many patients experience challenges with forming memories and then remembering them.
“This can lead to patients forgetting events in everyday life more often. They can thus have a reduced quality of life, in addition to facing challenges at school and in work. The project aims to identify brain signals that can predict whether an experience will be remembered or not”, explains the researcher.
If the researchers manage to identify such changes, the knowledge can hopefully be used in the treatment of memory loss in epilepsy.
Researches on people that are awake
Sugar and his research group at the Section of Physiology at the University of Oslo and at Oslo University Hospital will not conduct their research using animals.
“Humans are different from animals in that they can talk and describe their memories. Therefore, it is very difficult to study episodic memories in animals. We want to study the patterns of activity that nerve cells create in the human brain”, he says.
These studies are conducted on patients with epilepsy that already have brain electrodes in place. The researcher says that they will make extensive recordings of nerve cell activity in awake patients, while they describe memories. The patients will be put in situations that require the formation of memories, and the researchers will then see how brain activity changes when the patients forget, compared to when they remember. To identify such changes, they will use advanced machine learning.
“We want to find out how the brain uses nerve cell activity that encodes time and place, and how these are involved in encoding and recreating episodic memories”, says Sugar.