Department of Physiology and Biophysics

Congratulations to Drs. Cristin Welle and Dan Denman on receiving the ASPIRE grant award. Joining with them outside of our department are Dan Kramer, Isabelle Buard, and Marie Banich!

"Creating a cognitive neuroprosthesis for enhanced executive function"

Cognitive impairments in decision making, problem solving, and and planful cognitive control – collectively known as deficits in executive function (EF) – are common across many psychiatric and neurologic conditions. Improving EF has wide-reaching consequences for enhancing quality of life, occupational functionality, and overall mental health in broad populations of patients. Current treatments, including cognitive behavioral therapy and pharmaceuticals, have limited effectiveness due, in part, to a poor understanding of EF dynamics in human brain activity. This proposal seeks to leverage the world-class research programs in human neurophysiology and neurostimulation at CU Anschutz and Boulder to pioneer a Cognitive Neuroprosthesis aimed at improving executive function. Together we will decode neural biomarkers for EF dysfunction and apply real-time neurostimulation with taVNS to improve EF. By combining these approaches into a closed-loop therapeutic system, we will develop the first treatment system based on neural biomarkers to improve EF in patients with Parkinson’s Disease, and will lay the groundwork for cognitive function restoration in patients with psychiatric and neurologic conditions. This system will provide the first real-time, personalized system to restore cognitive flexibility, addressing a large and unmet clinical need.

Congratulations to the Christie lab on the publication of a new paper in Nature Neuroscience!

“Synchronous climbing fiber activity enables instructive signaling for cerebellar learning through modulation of disinhibitory circuits”

Check out the link in our bio!

This Memorial Day, we reflect with gratitude on those who served and sacrificed. Their legacy inspires our commitment to advancing knowledge and improving human health.

Please join us on Thursday, May 21st, for the 26th Annual A.R. Martin lecture hosted by our department.

"Prestin Conformational Dynamics and the Molecular Basis of Auditory Amplification”

⏰9:30-10:20AM
📍Hensel Phelps West Auditorium

Parley Neurotech & CU Anschutz Enroll First Patient in Clinical Trial Targeting the #1 Modifiable Risk Factor for Dementia!

Beating every published Phase II benchmark with 229 days from IND submission to first enrollment — in an indication with 800 million patients and no approved treatment.

Researchers Dr. Achim Klug and Dr. Dan Tollin have received a multi-year federal grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study a potential new treatment for age-related hearing loss.

Together with Drs. Ethan Hughes and Katie Rennie, the new research project focuses on clemastine, a common over-the-counter antihistamine (allergy medicine) that their earlier work suggests may help restore a form of hearing loss that commonly happens in aging. This grant will allow the teams to dig deeper into why and how this drug appears to work.

Specifically, they want to find out whether the treatment works at different ages, how long the hearing improvements last, and how to make the treatment as effective as possible. The ultimate goal is to turn these lab findings into a real treatment option for patients.

CU Anschutz Communications Highlights Our CAPD Clinical Trial! Find the link in our bio!

Spotlight on the Klug lab’s CAPD hearing-loss therapy now entering human trials.

🔔 New publication from the Peng Lab! 🔔

Alternative splicing of the Rbm24 gene is essential for cochlear hair cell stereocilia integrity and hearing function in mice

🔗 Check out the link in our bio to read it in full! 🔗

New Publication by the Denman lab!

"Non-uniform spike count shared variability in the mouse early visual system"

How does the brain turn messy, noisy signals into clear vision?Neurons don’t fire the same way every time. That variability might help or hurt how we see. Neurons don’t work alone. Their moment‑to‑moment fluctuations are shared. This shared variability can boost information… or scramble it.

Researchers used Neuropixels probes to listen to hundreds of neurons at once. They recorded from two connected visual areas in awake mice: V1 & dLGN. The team measured shared variability from milliseconds to seconds. Different timescales revealed different patterns of how neurons “co‑fluctuate"

Shared variability was low‑dimensional. These patterns could either help neurons work together or make them redundant. At very fine timescales (