Pratiksha Trust to give IISc’s Centre for Brain ₹450 crore for ageing brain research

Under this MoU, the Trust will provide support to CBR with an initial outlay to the tune of ₹450.27 crore over the next 10 years

Pratiksha Trust has signed an MoU with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and the Centre for Brain Research (CBR) — an autonomous Centre located on the Institute campus — to support fundamental and translational research on neurodegenerative diseases of the elderly population.

Under this MoU, the Pratiksha Trust has agreed to provide support to CBR in perpetuity, with an initial outlay to the tune of ₹450.27 crore over the next 10 years, for research, innovation and translation.

In 2014, the Trust, established by philanthropists Kris Gopalakrishnan and Sudha Gopalakrishnan, had helped set up this centre and helped create infrastructure in CBR.

The current MoU is an extension of this support for securing the future of CBR and strengthening its long-term studies on the aging brain. In a parallel initiative, the Pratiksha Trust will be supporting several ambitious, high-risk-high-reward interdisciplinary extramural projects in aging brain research.

IISc said that the Centre has initiated and completed four years of two unique longitudinal studies to track the ageing brain over a 15 to 20-year period in individuals older than 45 years of age — one for a rural cohort (in Srinivasapura Taluk of Kolar District, Karnataka) with 10,000 volunteers, and the other for an urban cohort (in and around Bengaluru) with 1,000 volunteers.

In the rural cohort, more than 5,400 volunteers have already been recruited and more than 6,600 multi-modal assessments have been completed (baseline as well as yearly follow-ups). The corresponding figures for the urban cohort (a project supported by the Tata Trusts) are more than 1,100 recruitments and more than 2,300 assessments. These cohort studies are providing a wealth of data, and preliminary analyses of the data collected so far are revealing important insights with implications for understanding the risk factors and protective factors for neurodegeneration.

The extension of support by the Pratiksha Trust through the current MoU will help identify new early biomarkers and molecular targets for novel drugs. The funding will help initiate and investigate the efficacy of evidence-based interventions (lifestyle-based as well as therapeutic). The funding will also enable the Centre to proactively explore and achieve complete bench-to-bedside translation of the outcomes from the interdisciplinary research.