Unlikely partnerships bring success through BrainsCAN

The collaboration between Western University’s BrainsCAN and McGill University’s Health Brains, Health Lives for the Initiative for Translational Neuroscience (ITN) has led to exciting research that will bring meaningful impact.

“The ITN served as a bridge that facilitated this collaboration,” explains Czarina Evangelista, ITN project manager at Western BrainsCAN. “The success of this collaboration was driven by a shared commitment to aligning technical standards, harmonizing multi-site workflows, and prioritizing constant communication.”

Evangelista managed the largest of the four ITN projects, a collaboration between Mallar Chakravarty at McGill and Marco Prado at Western looking at evaluating drug efficacy before it reaches the clinical phase.

Chakravarty, director of the Brain Imaging Centre at the Douglas Research Centre and associate professor at McGill University, says the collaboration was hard work.

“We brought together a bunch of different technologies to create a standardized kind of pre-clinical drug testing platform in the service of accelerating translation for neurodegenerative disorders,” he says. “Populations are aging, and this brings about a massive challenge in terms of the diseases we need to treat.”

There’s been a real problem with the drug pipeline, which can take decades to identify and test potential new treatments. To accelerate this, elements like recruitment, data collection and analysis need to be standardized, and multi-site projects prioritized in the pre-clinical testing phase – so those that move to the next phase of clinical trials are successful.

And that’s what this team is working to achieve, by assembling a group of collaborators, students and trainees working with each other and across sites.

“Making sure that we’re meeting all the time, and we’re getting together, and the trainees are getting together, that has been really very important for success,” says Prado, Canada Research Chair in Neurochemistry of Dementia at Western University. “We leveraged a lot of projects on this and we are collaborating with a number of different people.”

“The interesting thing is that we come from very different academic backgrounds,” Chakravarty adds. “I come from an engineering background and Marco’s a neurochemist – and we were able to build a platform, I think, that speaks to both of our forces and both of our expertise.”

On another ITN project, Martin Duennwald, Thomas Durcan and Sali Farhan, a professor at McGill and The Neuro, have been looking at how impaired transfer RNA (tRNAs) expression and processing contribute to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a progressive movement disorder, and whether it can be used as a biomarker on which to base a genetic testing platform.

“The question always comes, ‘What do you get when you bring a geneticist, a yeast biologist and a stem cell person together in a bar?’ And it ended in this pilot project,” explains Durcan, director of The Neuro’s Early Drug Discovery Unit and a professor with McGill.

In this case, the team developed a pipeline model from genetics, to yeast, to induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) modelling of disease, that they hope can be applied to new genetic research across neurodegenerative diseases to fill a critical knowledge gap.

Support for these collaborations through the ITN has brought about work that had never been done before says Duennwald, professor with Western’s Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry.

“It allowed us in this specific case to pursue a completely new idea that has never been tested before, going absolutely across different disciplines – a geneticist, a stem cell scientist and a molecular biologist working together at very different aspects and translate a genetic finding that affects patients, clearly, into mechanistic work and back.”

Being able to work across institutions and subjects allowed access to expertise that might not otherwise be available – a boon to the research itself and trainees looking for diverse perspectives. And without this support for innovative new research to bring in preliminary data, traditional funding streams are extremely difficult to access.

The value of this collaborative work, building on expertise in different but complimentary areas, extends to the use of open science tools to share data and final outputs.

As Chakravarty explains, “You can really benefit from having all the data and all the methods of out in the open so you can standardize things you just couldn’t standardize otherwise. And then keep the data out there for others to pick at.”

Making these collaborations work also meant everyone involved, from lead researchers to students, ignoring the “classical benchmarks of success,” by sharing authorship credits to get the best work out.

“It was really beneficial for BrainsCAN and HBHL to bring this ITN program together because I feel oftentimes scientists will work alone because they want to make certain discoveries and have their name attached to that discovery,” says Evangelista. “But in order to achieve the goal of advancing our knowledge to treat diseases this is really a team sport.”

The adage that the collective is better than the sum of its parts seems especially true in research, and there is hope from those involved in these collaborative projects that better mechanisms to support team science are on the horizon.