Center for brain health opens new facility From the cover
The big picture
UT Health Medical Complex 1 UT Health San Antonio Center for Brain Health 2 UT Health Medical Arts & Research Center 3 Parking garage
UT Health San Antonio's Center for Brain Health will bring together clinician expertise in dozens of disorders. The facility will participate in national research initiatives, focusing on clinical trials to enable earlier detection and treatment of rare diseases, said Dr. Carlayne Jackson, chair of neurology at UT Health San Antonio. She described the $100 million , 103,000-square- foot Center for Brain Health as a one-stop shop for patients with neurodegenerative diseases. As home to the Glenn Biggs Institute for Alzheimer’s and Neurodegenerative Diseases, the center employs clinicians who can innovate treatments by leveraging its brain bank, which contains over 2,000 donated brains, including nearly 500 from Texans, said Dr. Sudha Seshadri, the founding director of the Glenn Biggs Institute for Alzheimer’s and Neurodegenerative Diseases. “We can test different treatments, look at different types of models, and, hopefully, bring only the most promising compounds to human studies,” Seshadri said.
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SOURCE: UT HEALTH SAN ANTONIO/COMMUNITY IMPACT
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Zooming in
to learn a lot about.” The Center for Brain Health is conducting over 55 active clinical trials and over 265 observational studies. Some of the clinical trials include drug and aging-related studies, clinical trials for conditions without approved treatments and Alzheimer’s disease research. Other studies use emerging technologies to predict falls and monitor treatments using wearable and at-home devices.
Jackson said that with 40 neurology residents and eight fellowships, the center offers a unique environment to train the next generation of neurologists. “We’ve always considered our clinics a research lab in many aspects,” Jackson said. “[Patients participating in clinical trials] is an opportunity for us to collect information that will allow us to answer questions about diseases that we still need
Parkinson’s disease Alzheimer’s disease Brain health clinical care offerings
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS Stroke Epilepsy Multiple sclerosis Muscular dystrophy neuropathy
SOURCE: UT HEALTH SAN ANTONIO/COMMUNITY IMPACT
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