GELIFES Seminars - Matt Jones

Matt Jones (University of Bristol)

Meet the Sleep Detectives

Co-designing a precision medicine toolkit for neurodevelopmental disorders

We work alongside children and young people with neurodevelopmental disorders to understand brain mechanisms causing their symptoms and develop treatments that may help. Collaborating with these young people is a joy, and central to making our science work. Our precision medicine approach begins with youth at high risk of autism and schizophrenia due to 22q11.2 deletion syndrome (22q11.2DS), a genomic microdeletion occurring in roughly 1:2000 live births. There are no treatments for their syndromes; children, families and carers face daunting burdens, and have particularly highlighted challenges caused by chronic sleep disruption.

I will introduce the co-designed toolkit of wearables, nearables and video games that we use to understand mechanisms driving impaired sleep and sensory processing. We have conducted at-home brain recordings revealing atypical rhythmic brain activity during sleep and auditory stimulation. “Snoozie the Robot” has developed computational models of the neural networks generating these rhythms, letting us to zoom-in to mechanisms and test “virtual drugs”, predicting which neurotransmitter systems could be targeted to alleviate symptoms. We our now testing these predictions in mouse genetic models, with hope that some re-purposed drugs might be the precision medicines our team of ‘Sleep Detectives’ need.

Biosketch:
“I trained as a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge, the UK National Institute for Medical Research and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before establishing my research team at the University of Bristol. My lab strives to understand how distributed neural networks spanning hippocampus, striatum and prefrontal cortex process and store information, and how this processing becomes impaired in neuropsychiatric disorders. To do this, we record and modulate brain activity (with Neuropixels in rodents and EEG in humans), then apply computational modelling and analyses to try and decode the terabytes. Current projects include analyses of sleep’s contributions to cognition, the diagnostic and translational utility of sleep neurophysiology and the circuit architecture of psychedelic drug action.”