Joel EngelhardtScientist Lin Tian moved to Jupiter last year to take advantage of the pure science setting at Abacoa’s Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience.
Lin Tian, born in China but living in America since college, moved to Jupiter last year to be scientific director at the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience.
She heads a lab where scientists can insert tiny cameras into living brains to answer some of the most indecipherable questions known to humankind.
Tian leads a team awarded an $11 million, five-year U.S. grant last month to pursue brain research with four academic institutions, including Stanford University and the Allen Institute in Seattle.
Tian, 45, who transferred to Max Planck in October from the University of California-Davis, discussed the grant, her reasons for moving to South Florida and how brain chemistry works during a wide-ranging Stet News interview last month.
She spoke of the inroads she has helped make in the study of brain chemistry and how little scientists know about the brain.
While doctors routinely prescribe medicines to act on the brain chemicals dopamine and serotonin, she said, “we actually have no clue about the exact mechanism.”
While patients often are told their behavior stems from “an unbalanced concentration of neurochemicals,” it’s not that simple, she said.
“Our brain is not just the fluid of those neurochemicals. It’s not a soup. It’s actually a very well-organized system and there’s really precision — temporal, spatial — like where and when they release. So it’s a very, very controlled system that we have no clue how this happened.”
By moving to Max Planck, Tian is free to focus on research rather than devoting time to the classroom as she did at UC-Davis. She leads a team of about 18 researchers plus, over the summer, six interns from local high schools.
“The reason I came here is to really focus on research for the next 10 years to make a groundbreaking discovery,” she said from her Jupiter office.
Monitoring brain signals
The grant, coming after a 40 percent reduction in support for the Obama-era BRAIN Initiative, aims to build tools to monitor brain electrical signals and levels of brain chemicals in real-time.
During her postdoctoral training at Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus, Tian played a critical role in developing the calcium sensor GCaMP, making it possible to optically measure the brain’s activity during behavior.
The approach involves lighting up nerve cells, so they can be viewed through a tiny camera threaded into the brain.
“This technological achievement has transformed the field of neuroscience,” Max Planck said in a news release touting the BRAIN Initiative grant from the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Institutes of Health.
Max Planck, the German-based institution, came to Abacoa in 2008 with $190 million in state and local financial support, on the heels of the $580 million effort to woo The Scripps Research Institute from San Diego to Jupiter.
While Scripps has relinquished its holdings here to the University of Florida, Max Planck remains. It has nine labs, including Tian’s, and more than 140 full-time employees.
Tian has been in the country since pursuing her doctorate in biochemistry, molecular and cellular biology from Northwestern University in 2001. She is married and the mother of two sons.
But she uprooted for Max Planck, she said, because of its focus on discovery.
“The philosophy is that, well, first of all, you need to be fearless,” something she found more difficult in a public university setting because of her teaching responsibilities.
“Without risk, it’s really hard to have a transformative discovery, especially with developing technology. So Max Planck, their philosophy is that, to tackle the most challenging questions, they really encourage your high-risk, high-reward research.”
Collaboration will help spread Max Planck’s message, she said, particularly with success.
“I’m thinking, ‘how can we leverage as a resource to make a big difference?’ The only way to do that is to collaborate … and then make a big discovery.”
Redefining serotonin
With that she launched into an explanation of her project.
It focuses on probing and observing neurochemicals dyed with fluorescence in the brain, “so you can actually start to measure or visualize the release events of those neurochemicals and how they are modified by treatment.”
The release of dopamine, she said, is connected to happiness. Too much dopamine can lead to addiction, where drugs stimulating dopamine hijack the reward system.
Scientists used to think of serotonin, which is chemically close to dopamine, in a similar way. It became a key target of anti-depressants, in drugs such as Prozac.
“We have, actually, really interesting findings about why this drug does not work very well,” she said. “Because we can monitor serotonin now.”
“When you only take it like, say, one week, short-term, you actually make (patients) more depressed and have the trend for suicide,” she said. “But if you take them longer, for example, four weeks, they start to feel relieved. So why is that?
“We actually found serotonin is not a happy molecule. It’s actually the opposite.”
Building on biotech
She uses the development of the iPhone to help explain her commitment to technology.
“There’s an initial prototype, and then you go to the first generation iPhone, right? … So the same thing for this type of technology, we just have to keep optimizing them, making them better, more precise, faster.
“So we can measure with more precision in the brain to gather more information. … We develop a technology that we prove is useful. And now we need to work on the new generation of this technology.
“So this plan is about bringing the technology to the next generation.”
It speaks to the initial effort to bring biotech to Palm Beach County. Like many who promoted biotech in the early 2000s, she wants to make sure there are high-tech jobs here for her children.
“How do you create those jobs to bring your kids back? I feel like this investment is really for the next generation. It’s not just for research, but really for the next generation, to build Florida as the east coast (version of) San Diego.”
