Canadian neurosciences company embraces crowd-sourcing to speed search for cures

May 1, 2012 - PRLog -- Victoria, BC May 1, 2012. A Canadian neurosciences company is bringing “the crowd” to neurosciences in order to accelerate research on major brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s or schizophrenia.

Applied Brain and Vision Sciences (ABVSciences) of Victoria, British Columbia has developed the NeuroSciences Accelerator, a first-of-its-kind online data processing system built to crowd-source data from global neuroscience researchers in order to speed the pace of research through the building of a shared brain-function library.
“By speeding ways to source, share, and aggregate data, our goal is to support researchers to get to treatments and cures faster,” says Dr. Philip Michael Zeman, founder of ABVSciences.
The current academic paper process is very time consuming, explains Zeman, who was principal developer on a University of Victoria team that developed the NeuroScience Accelerator’s underlying technology.
“Our goal is to effect a revolution by helping neuroscientists share data more readily. Through the NeuroSciences Accelerator, we can make vast sets of brain-function data available to researchers to help them find those small bits of data which are often overlooked. These overlooked bits of data could actually be the key to understanding Alzheimer’s or other brain-related illnesses.”
By enabling the crowd sourcing of brain-function data and then organizing scientific replication of research, we remove some of the roadblocks to getting diagnostics and treatments into doctor’s offices faster for diseases like Alzheimer’s.
According to the U.S. Alzheimer’s Association, Alzheimer’s is “the sixth-leading cause of death in the United States and the only cause of death among the top 10 in the United States that cannot be prevented, cured, or even slowed.”
“We want to change that prognosis by helping the research community,” says Zeman. “The NeuroScience Accelerator is our response to the new focus on Alzheimer’s research, which is early detection. If we can detect when the brain begins to change earlier, we might have a fighting chance of delaying onset or finding causation.”
ABVSciences has recently taken another unprecedented step in neurosciences research. On April 27, 2012 the company launched a crowd-funding campaign on the IndieGogo.com crowd-funding site.
“Since we are crowd-sourcing data from neuroscience researchers,” Zeman says, “we are also looking look to crowd-fund our efforts to make our service accessible to global researchers. We can all help by working together.”
Those who contribute through the indiegogo.com campaign are rewarded with the ability to allocate minutes of the NeuroScience Accelerator for specific research projects. Current projects waiting for NeuroScience Accelerator time include: 1) Alzheimer’s, 2) schizophrenia and bipolar Disorder, and 3) audio processing disorders.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iz8lW_Pka_o