Fondation Ipsen: 20Th Neuronal Plasticity Prize Awarded to Three Eminent Scientistsfor Their Research into the Domain of the Brain-Machine Interaction: Alim-Louis Benabid, Apostolos P. Georgopoulos and Miguel A. L. Nicolelis

PARIS--(Business Wire)--
The 20th annual Neuronal Plasticity Prize has been awarded to Alim-Louis Benabid
(CEA Minatec LETI,Grenoble, France), Apostolos P. Georgopoulos (University of
Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA) and Miguel A. L. Nicolelis (Duke University,
Durham, USA) for their research in the domain of the brain-machine interaction.
The €60,000 prize was awarded on 27 May 2009 by an international jury1 led by
Professor Wolf Singer (Max-Planck Institute for Brain Research, Frankfurt,
Germany) at the 9thSociété des Neurosciences Meeting in Bordeaux, France.

About the winners

Alim-Louis Benabid is a neurosurgeon, Emeritus Professor in biophysics at the
University Hospital Joseph Fournier (Grenoble, France) and Scientific Counsel of
the French Commissariat à l`Energie Atomique. He is member of the Institut
Universitaire de France, of the French Academy of Sciences, of the French
Academy of Medicine and of the Royal Academy of Medicine of Belgium. Dr.
Benabid`s research has been focused on the neurosurgical pathologies,
particularly of brain tumors as well as movement disorders. He has also
developed surgical methods, particularly stereotactic. Dr. Benabid`s new method
of stereotactic inhibition of surgical targets, which was initially limited to
the thalamus and the pallidum, has diminished the side effects of long-term
dopaminergic treatment in patients with Parkinson`s disease. The discovery in
1987 of the effects mimicking the lesion induced by electrical stimulation at
high frequency caused a rebirth of stereostatic surgery and new therapeutic
possibilities. The remarkable efficacy of this treatment, associated to its very
low morbidity, has allowed surgeons to apply this method to other targets,
including the subthalamic nucleus, and has led to a diminished need for medical
treatments.

Apostolos P. Georgopoulos is Regents Professor at the University of Minnesota,
Professor of Neuroscience, Neurology and Psychiatry, and the McKnight
Presidential Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience. Dr. Georgopoulos is an elected
member of the Institute of Medicine of the US National Academy of Sciences, the
Academy of Athens, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and
Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences. He has
pioneered the application of analyses based on neuronal populations to decipher
brain activity underlying the planning of movement, cognitive processing, and,
more recently, brain disease using magnetoencephalography.

Miguel A. L. Nicolelis is the Anne W. Deane Professor of Neuroscience and
Professor of Neurobiology, Biomedical Engineering and Psychology at Duke
University. He is also Co-Director of Duke Center for Neuroengineering; and
Co-Founder and Scientific Director of the Edmond and Lily Safra International
Institute for Neuroscience of Natal. Dr. Nicolelis has devoted his career to the
search for the physiological principles that govern the interaction of large
populations of neurons in behaving animals. Although Dr. Nicolelis is best known
for his study of Brain Machine Interfaces (BMI) for neuroprosthetics in human
patients and non-human primates, he is also developing an integrative approach
to studying neurological and psychiatric disorders by recording neuronal
ensemble activity across different brain areas in genetically modified mice. Dr.
Nicolelis believes that this approach will allow the integration of molecular,
cellular, systems, and behavioral data in the same animal, producing a more
complete understanding of the nature of the alterations associated with these
disorders.

About the Neuronal Plasticity Prize

Founded in 1990, the Neuronal Plasticity Prize of La Fondation Ipsen has been
awarded to renowned specialists: Albert Aguayo (Montréal, 1990), Anders
Björklund (Lund, 1990), Fred Gage (La Jolla, 1990), Ursula Bellugi (La Jolla,
1991), Wolf Singer (Frankfurt, 1990), Torsten Wiesel (New York, 1991), Philippe
Ascher (Paris, 1992), Kjell Fuxe (Stockholm, 1992), Terje Lomo (Oslo, 1992), Per
Andersen (Oslo, 1993), Masao Ito (Wako Saitama, 1993), Constantino Sotelo
(Paris, 1993), Mariano Barbacid (Princeton, 1994), Yves Barde
(Planegg-Martinsried, 1994), Hans Thoenen (Planegg-Martinsried, 1994), Jacques
Mehler (Paris, 1995), Brenda Milner (Montreal, 1995), Mortimer Mishkin
(Bethesda, 1995), Friedrich Bonhoeffer (Tubingen, 1996), Corey Goodman
(Berkeley, 1996), Marc Tessier-Lavigne (San Francisco, 1996), Antonio Damasio
(Iowa City, 1997), Richard Frackowiac (London, 1997), Michael Merzenich (San
Francisco, 1997), Heinrich Betz (Frankfurt, 1998), Gerald Fischbach (Boston,
1998), Uel McMahan (Stanford, 1998), Masakazu Konishi (Pasadena, 1999), Peter
Marler (Davis, 1999), Fernando Nottebohm (Millbrook, 1999), Tomas Hökfelt
(Stockholm, 2000), Lars Olson (Stockholm, 2000), Lars Terenius (Stockholm,
2000), Albert Galaburda (Boston, 2001), John Morton (Londres, 2001), Elisabeth
Spelke (Cambridge, USA, 2001), Arturo Alvarez-Buylla (San Francisco, 2002),
Ronald Mc Kay (Bethesda, 2002), Sam Weiss (Calgary, 2002), François Clarac
(Marseille, 2003), Sven Grillner (Stockholm, 2003), Serge Rossignol (Montréal,
2003), James Gusella (Boston, 2004), Jean-Louis Mandel (Strasbourg, 2004), Huda
Y. Zoghbi (Houston, 2004), Ann Graybiel (Cambridge, USA, 2005), Trevor Robbins
(Cambridge, UK, 2005), Wolfram Schultz (Cambridge, UK, 2005, Eckhart D.
Gundelfinger (Magdeburg, 2006), Mary B. Kennedy (Pasadena, 2006), Morgan Sheng
(Cambridge, USA, 2006), Nikos K. Logothetis (Tübingen, 2007), Keiji Tanaka
(Wako, 2007), Giacomo Rizzolati (Parma, 2007), Jean-Pierre Changeux (Paris,
2008), Peter W. Kalivas (Charleston 2008) andEric J. Nestler (Dallas, 2008).

La Fondation Ipsen

Established in 1983 under the aegis of the Fondation de France, the mission of
La Fondation Ipsen is to contribute to the development and dissemination of
scientific knowledge. The long-standing action of La Fondation Ipsen is aimed at
furthering the interaction between researchers and clinical practitioners, which
is indispensable due to the extreme specialisation of these professions. The
ambition of La Fondation Ipsen is not to offer definitive knowledge, but to
initiate a reflection about the major scientific issues of the forthcoming
years. It has developed an important international network of scientific experts
who meet regularly at meetings known as Colloques Médecine et Recherche,
dedicated to six main themes: Alzheimer's disease, neurosciences, longevity,
endocrinology, the vascular system and cancer science. In 2007, La Fondation
Ipsen started three new series of meetings. The first is in partnership with the
Salk Institute and Nature and is an annual meeting which focuses on aspects of
Biological Complexity; the second is the "Emergence and Convergence" series with
Nature with 4 workshops a year, and the third annual meeting is with Cell and
the Massachusetts General Hospital entitled "Exciting Biologies". Since its
beginning, La Fondation Ipsen has organised more than 100 international
conferences, published 69 volumes with renowned publishers and more than 205
issues of a widely distributed newsletter Alzheimer Actualités. It has also
awarded more than 100 prizes and grants.

1 Albert Aguayo (Montreal General Hospital, Montréal), Joël Bockaert (Institut
de Génomique Fonctionnelle, Montpellier), Alexis Brice (Hôpital de la
Salpètrière, Paris), Stanlislas Dehaene (Inserm U562, Orsay), Stephen Dunnett
(Cardiff University, Cardiff), Kjell Fuxe (Karolinska Institute, Stockholm),
Marc Jeannerod (Institut des Sciences Cognitives, Lyon), Christine Petit
(Institut Pasteur, Paris).

Fondation Ipsen
Brunswick Group
Robin Gilliland
Telephone: +1- 212 333 3810
Email: rgilliland@brunswickgroup.com
or
Justine McIlroy
Telephone: + 44 (0)207 396 3536
Fax: + 44 (0) 207 936 7836
Email: jmcilroy@brunswickgroup.com

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