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NEUROLOGY New Center to Focus on Nervous System Repair A new research collaboration between Massachusetts General Hospital and HMS will bring together investigators with common interests in nervous system repair, targeted at translating this work into benefit for patients over the coming decades. The Center for Nervous System Repair, based in the MGH Department of Neurosurgery, will have components both "within walls" and "beyond walls," said center director Jeffrey Macklis, HMS associate professor of neurology (neuroscience) at MGH. Initially, it will include Macklis and five or six other faculty located within the center's walls, along with eight or nine faculty members in other HMS departments. Their interests include differentiation of neurons and other nervous system cells, neural precursors and stem cells, neural transplantation, axonal guidance and outgrowth, and gene delivery. "The new space, facilities, and intellectual focus for collaboration and interdisciplinary work will allow more rapid progress than any one lab could achieve, along with venturesome expansions of our work," Macklis said. "The center will allow us to pursue each lab's central research directions while also building a larger vision and enterprise toward bringing basic neuroscience research eventually toward nervous system repair." He credits MGH Neurosurgery chair Robert Martuza, HMS dean Joseph Martin, and MGH president James Mongan as being instrumental in establishing the center. It will be a complementary effort, though on a smaller scale, to the "R" aspect of the Harvard Center for Neurodegeneration and Repair, he added. Already under way this fall is a monthly series of interdepartmental neuroscience lectures in the form of joint grand rounds for the MGH Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry departments, initially focusing on the basic science of nervous system repair. Also planned is a focused seminar series and a series of "journal club/informal lab results talks" by students, postdocs, and faculty affiliated with the center. In the future, Macklis said, he foresees increasing inter-lab collaboration, with shared funding, facilities, and equipment. By December 2002, the center will occupy newly constructed and renovated space in the hospital's Edwards and Wellman buildings. --Tom Reynolds