Final Report Summary - BRAINPOWER (Brain energy supply and the consequences of its failure)
This project established capillary pericytes as major regulators of brain blood flow, both physiologically and after ischaemia. This opens up new therapeutic possibilities for treating stroke, and suggests new concepts for the effects of ischaemia on non-brain tissues. It also discovered: a novel mechanism by which myelin is damaged in ischaemia and thus opens up new therapeutic possibilities for treating white matter ischaemia,novel signalling pathways controlling blood flow at the capillary and the arteriole level differentially, the relative magnitude of the energy supply from oxidative phosphorylation and glycolysis in brain slices, how synapses are optimised to maximise the information transmitted per energy used.