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Cliff Astley celebrates 40 years of service this week with the University of Washington and Primate Center. Those years only count his employment. He actually started with the WaNPRC four years earlier in 1972 as a graduate student. He was interested in studying marine mammalian physiology and learned that Orville Smith, then director of the Primate Center, had previously studied the cardiovascular diving reflexes in elephant seals. He applied to UW and was initially an alternate, but ultimately was accepted to the Physiology and Biophysics program.

After learning that there wasn’t much marine mammal work being conducted, he turned his attention to Rhesus monkeys for his thesis on the “Role of the Cerebellar Fastigial Nucleus on the baroreflex and cardiovascular responses to body tilting.” After graduating, he accepted a job with Orville Smith as a research scientist, managing Smith’s lab. Cliff’s first 25 years were spent in this research role for Smith with a broad range of duties, including: training animals, managing budgets, human resources, histology, IT and surgery. As Dr. Smith was retiring, they transitioned Cliff’s responsibilities from serving just the lab to offering IT and surgery services to the entire Primate Center.

Cliff and Keith Vogel began working together in 1972-1973. Cliff performed his first surgery in 1968, and Keith in 1969. In 2019, they will have a combined 100 years of surgical experience between them. It is hard for Cliff to imagine a surgical team with more experience anywhere in the world, especially a research surgical team.

“We have done hundreds and hundreds of procedures together,” says Cliff Astley of his relationship with Keith. “To me, our style, experience and skill levels are so similar that it is like working with 4 of my own hands. Hope he feels that way.” They both step in automatically to assist the other if they hesitate during a procedure.

Cliff and Keith spend more and more time training others in the surgical suite in anticipation of retiring in the future. Training and serving others is just part of what drives Cliff each day in his roles as IT consultant and staff surgeon.

Cliff Astley begins his 40th year of employment with the UW and WaNPRC on Tuesday, September 13.

Important neuroscience research being conducted by the Buffalo Lab at the Washington National Primate Research Center is being shared at the Pacific Science Center.

The “Memory: Past Meets Present” exhibit is part of the Portal to Current Research that showcases local scientific research and its impact. The exhibit is open now through March 5, 2017.

“We are excited to be a part of this exhibit,” says Dr. Beth Buffalo, Chief Investigator with the Division of Neuroscience at the Washington National Primate Research Center. “This is a great opportunity to teach the public about our efforts to detect early warning signs of Alzheimer’s disease in healthy human patients.”

The Buffalo lab uses nonhuman primate research to track the combination of eye movements and the firing of neurons in the hippocampus to predict memory performance. In the lab, monkeys play a video game that has special software to track eye movement as the monkey navigates a virtual world in search of bananas. When the monkey finds a banana, the system provides a treat to the research subject. Treats are normally a special recipe of various fruit sauces. A map of the virtual world correlates to specific neurons in the patient’s hippocampus region of the brain.

The exhibit allows visitors to learn about this virtual built-in GPS system that human and nonhuman primates share. While playing the game, you’ll discover what information is stored in our brains while foraging for food in a virtual forest.

Buffalo Lab graduate student, Seth Konig, will give a public lecture titled “The Neuroscience of Memory: Why We Forget Some Things but Remember Others” at the Pacific Science Center on November 1 at 7 p.m. Admission is $5.

Visit www.pacificsciencecenter.org/lectures for more information.

This exhibit series is funded by a grant from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. Learn more by visiting www.pacificsciencecenter.org.

Megan O’Connor, PhD., of the Fuller laboratory receives NIH-sponsored post-doctoral training fellowship from the University of Washington Center for AIDS and STD. The fellowship will pay O’Connor a yearly stipend to complete her post-doctoral research that will take place at the Washington National Primate Research Center.

The fellowship will assist O’Connor’s research by covering her salary and making funds available for her experiments. In addition, the fellowship program provides O’Connor with educational and networking opportunities designed to improve her knowledge of sexually transmitted diseases and AIDS research while enhancing her personal development as a post-doctoral fellow.

O’Connor joined the Fuller lab in January of 2016. The lab investigates therapeutic and prophylactic DNA vaccines for HIV. They are also testing new adjuvants designed to stimulate both systemic and mucosal antibody and T cell responses.

“Our lab has a major focus on investigating and improving therapeutic HIV vaccines using the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) macaque model for AIDS,” says O’Connor. “This research will help us to better understand how we can improve vaccine efficacy.”

HIV in humans is very similar to SIV, which is found in many species of nonhuman primates. The Fuller lab currently has several ongoing macaque model vaccine studies, of which O’Connor is involved in, which are planned to run through 2021.

HIV and SIV infection creates a misbalance of two cell types in the gut during infection. The misbalance of T-regulatory (Treg) and T helper 17 (Th17) cells is associated with HIV/SIV progression. The goal of O’Connor’s project is to determine whether SIV vaccination also has an effect on these different cell types in the gut mucosa.

Using the SIV macaque model for AIDS, they investigate the ability of vaccines to therapeutically treat SIV infection and residual virus in the gut mucosa. Previous studies in the Fuller lab showed that therapeutic immunization with a DNA vaccine that induces responses in the gut mucosa resulted in a functional cure from AIDS, or durable control of viral replication when administered to chronically infected animals in combination with short-term treatment with antiretroviral drugs (immunotherapy). These studies also aim to define the role of mucosal responses, in particular, and other immune mechanisms underlying the response to vaccination, protection from infection, or induction of durable viral control.

According to the World Health Organization, 37 million people are living with HIV globally. Since the beginning of the epidemic, more than 70 million people have been infected by the disease and 35 million have died from it. There are currently 17 million people worldwide on antiretroviral therapies for HIV/AIDS. The most promising vaccine approaches from these studies may lead to future clinical testing of these strategies in HIV infected humans.

Learn more about the AIDS-related disease research being conducted at the WaNPRC.

Learn more about the STD/AIDS Research Training Fellowship Program from the UW Center for AIDS and STD.

Dr. Kyes often travels for up to seven months each year as the leader of the Division of Global Programs for the Washington National Primate Research Center and Director of UW’s Center for Global Field Study. Students from around the world get to learn about the convergence of environmental and global health through field course programs in countries such as: Indonesia, Nepal, China, India and Thailand. Kyes has spent nearly 30 years leading field courses in a dozen countries. UW Today writer Deborah Bach recently interviewed Dr. Kyes about his experiences, outreach efforts, challenges and rewards of running this successful program. The piece is titled: From crop-raiding monkeys to political unrest: UW’s Randy Kyes embarks on 100th field course.

Researchers are studying memory formation in the primate brain—and finding clues for interventions for Alzheimer disease along the way.

Giuseppe sits in a small room playing a videogame, joystick in hand. He zooms through a grassy field, foraging for big yellow bananas. Banking left, he speeds along a stonewall and captures two. A sweet treat rolls down a tube into his mouth, and he munches on his reward. Giuseppe, a monkey, is a research participant in the Buffalo Lab at the University of Washington.

In the lab next door, researchers watch a thin yellow line zigzag across a computer screen, with a loud crackling sound. “That’s the sound of a neuron firing an action potential,” says graduate student Seth Koenig, who is recording the activity of single neurons in the monkey’s brain, via a hair-thin electrode implanted into the medial temporal lobe. A camera setup tracks his darting eye movements.

Along with four other monkeys trained to play various computer games, Giuseppe is helping researchers to figure out how the primate brain forms memories—and clues to interventions for the memory impairments of Alzheimer disease along the way.

Read full article from the UW Medicine Memory & Brain Wellness Center…

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Zika virus is spread to people primarily through the bite of an infected Aedes mosquito. Common symptoms for adults is very similar to a flu virus, including: fever, rash, joint pain, and dry and itchy eyes. Zika virus can be passed from a pregnant woman to her fetus. Infection during pregnancy can cause Microcephaly and other severe brain injuries.

The virus continues to spread. Women who are pregnant or planning to become pregnant should not travel to affected areas in South America, Central America and the Caribbean. Kristina Adams Waldorf, UW associate professor of obstetrics & gynecology and affiliate researcher at the Washington National Primate Research Center, is studying this viral disease. She was recently interviewed by KOMO news and offers advice to pregnant women on current recomendations on travel and provides basic Zika virus information. Click here to read the full article.

Link Between Hippocampus and Memory

The ability of the brain to store and later retrieve information is remarkable.  Detailed, complex memories can be formed after as little as one exposure, and those memories can be retained for decades.  This ability is compromised following damage to structures located in the medial temporal lobe, including the hippocampus and the adjacent entorhinal cortex.  The link between the hippocampus and memory has been appreciated since the report of the famous case of patient H.M., who suffered a dense amnesia following removal of the hippocampus and adjacent cortex in order to relieve otherwise intractable epilepsy. Subsequent studies in rats, nonhuman primates, and human patients have demonstrated that the integrity of medial temporal lobe structures is critical for normal memory ability.

Place Cells

While it has long been recognized that these structures are important for memory, a largely parallel line of research in rodents has highlighted the contribution of these same structures to our sense of space. This line of research began in the 1970’s with the discovery of hippocampal “place cells” – neurons that are selectively active when an animal moves through specific locations in an environment, with each neuron active in a distinct location. Recordings from many of these neurons simultaneously provide an exquisite map of the animal’s environment. Accordingly, these neurons are thought to aid in spatial navigation and constitute an internal or cognitive map.

What is currently unclear, however, is how this cognitive map contributes to memory formation, which is considered the primary function of these brain structures. While spatial information is a critical component of episodic memory, or memory for past events in one’s life, the details of how memories are formed and the relationship between spatial and mnemonic representations are not well understood, particularly in the primate brain.

Consensus between the memory and spatial views has been difficult because of differences in the species and approaches used – most experiments on memory involve human subjects, whereas most experiments on spatial cognition involve maze behavior in rodents. Research in nonhuman primates presents an opportunity to bridge the gap between the more invasive research of cells and circuits that have been investigated in rodents and complex behaviors that can be measured in humans. A recent focus of research in the Buffalo lab is to take advantage of the complex memory abilities that can be demonstrated by nonhuman primates, along with recordings from single neurons and neuronal ensembles, in order to try to bridge the gap between the spatial and mnemonic views of hippocampal function.

Using Virtual Reality to Examine Brain Activity

One exciting new way that we are addressing these issues involves the development of behavioral tasks for the monkey using virtual reality coupled with neurophysiological recordings. This technique allows us to examine hippocampal activity during environmental navigation and to investigate neural activity in the medial temporal lobe that may underlie complex behaviors.

We have successfully implemented techniques in our laboratory for assessing neuronal activity along with eye movements as monkeys are engaged in virtual 3D navigation.  In addition, we have successfully trained monkeys to use a joystick to navigate through the environment, obtaining reward for navigating to specific targets. One exciting preliminary result from our recordings in the hippocampus is the identification of a prominent theta rhythm (3-8 Hz) during virtual movement, the peak frequency of which is strongly correlated to the frequency of eye movements. We are also examining hippocampal activity as the monkeys perform spatial memory tasks in which they are rewarded for remembering the location of hidden targets in the virtual environment. We have identified patterns of neural activity, in the form of enhanced gamma-band (30-90 Hz) correlated activity that is predictive of successful memory performance.

Goal: Restore Memory

One goal of this work is to find ways to use deep brain stimulation to restore memory in individuals who have impaired abilities due to traumatic brain injury. An additional goal is to use information gained from studies in nonhuman primates to aid in the development of novel behavioral tools for early diagnosis of cognitive deficits due to neurodegenerative disease, including Alzheimer’s. Our expectation is that the findings from our studies in nonhuman primates will be used to inform clinical research and, hopefully, improve clinical practice in the future.

Beth Buffalo  |  Core Staff Scientist  |  Chair of WaNPRC Division of Neuroscience