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PETER CHIARELLI: When you combine all the diseases of the brain into the total economic
burden on this country every single year it comes to over a trillion dollars a year we
spend.
[MUSIC]
[MUSIC]
PETER CHIARELLI: One Mind for Research is an organization that wants to become the American
Heart Association for all the diseases and injuries of the brain. And I think what's
different about One Mind is we're trying to unify all the different advocacy groups that
have been created around all these diseases. But when we look at the diseases of the brain
we categorize them as single diseases such as Alzheimer's, such as dementia, such as
autism when in reality that all emanate from from the brain and that's how we should be
thinking of them. What we know today, or atleast science is helping us understand today, that
if you take the diseases of post-traumatic stress, traumatic brain injury, dementia,
Alzheimer's, even Parkinson's and ALS, there are many researches that will make the argument
that they are, in fact, all connected. Yet, people who are researching Alzheimer's don't
even know what everybody who is researching Alzheimer's is doing because individual researchers
maintain the data that they, in fact, gather as intellectual property. So it is a field
that is ripe for change, particularly in a world of big data. One Mind believes that
data should be accessible to all. Let me give you an example. The Michael J. Fox Foundation
funds research into Parkinson's disease….about 55 million dollars a year. Very..very successful
organization that's doing wonderful things. But they could be so much more efficient in
how that spent that 55 million dollars if they knew what everybody else was doing in
the area of Parkinson's disease. And they don't because researchers don't make their
research available for everyone to see until it shows up in a refereed journal article…let
alone see the research that's going on in diseases that are on the left side and the
right side of Parkinson's disease. So what we want to do, One Mind, is create a portal,
an information portal where the data from the research that we fund is sent to that
portal and available for all researchers to data mine. And when they data mine that research
and that data, we know that they can come up with disease models and those disease models
lead to better diagnostics, better patient outcomes, and in some cases maybe even cures.
We feel, One Mind feels, that this is just an absolutely critical change we need to make
in the way we do basic research in this country so that we can in fact understand these diseases.
Because the researcher who's doing research in Alzheimer's may find a key for the researcher
who's working in dementia, or traumatic brain injury, or Lou Gehrig's disease. So, it just
makes sense to change the business model and find a way that we can, in fact, make this
data available for all to mine.
[MUSIC]
PETER CHIARELLI: when you combine all the diseases of the brain into the total economic
burden on this country every single year, you take all the Alzheimer's, the autisms,
all of them and you combine them, it comes to over a trillion dollars a year we spend.
And that's why One MInd's mission is so absolutely critical. We are solely focused on one thing
and that's doing research, not research for research sake, not basic research just to
do basic research, but basic research that we translate…we translate into better diagnostics
and better treatments and hopefully cures for these diseases that are such a huge burden
on this country and in the entire world. You know, as we go around and leave the confines
of the United States there's a tendency at times to believe that these are only injuries
that Americans experience. That's not the case. The European Union has done a similar
study into the total cost in the European Union and it's a trillion dollars in the European
Union. So you take Europe and the United States, you combine them together, they're spending
two trillion dollars a year on the diseases of the brain. Now let's put the spotlight
on China. Go to a developing country where you have a much higher use of bicycles. Go
to a developing country where you may not have the same laws for people whoa re driving
in the street and you combine a huge number of bicycles and cars of individuals who may
not be the best drivers in the world and you have a huge number of individuals with TBI,
traumatic brain injury. You know, it's not just soldiers who have TBI. One of the most
interesting things to me was I went to see our lead investigator, a guy named Dr. Geoff
Manley, who took me to his ward at San Francisco General Hospital on a Monday and on both Saturday
and Sunday they had 20 individuals that came into their emergency room that had to have
CT and MRI scans who had suffered some kind of traumatic brain injury. That's amazing
to me. And none of these were veterans, none of these were soldiers off the battlefield.
These were all individuals in their part of San Francisco who came to the emergency room
with some kind of head trauma. 1.7 million Americans every single year suffer head trauma.
It was one of the leading causes of death and injury in this country according to the
CDC. That we don't know more about it, that we don't know how to treat it or to diagnose
it, to me is a sad state of affairs. And that's why One Mind is totally focused, that's our
sweet spot, to try to use private philanthropy to ramp up research into these horrible horrible
horrible injuries and diseases.
PETER CHIARELLI: I'm General Pete Chiarelli and I'm commanding you to subscribe to THNKR.