Project: Bridging the gap between mind, brain and body (Mindgap)
The Mindgap project presents a radical new vision that may bridge the gap between health status and mind/body interactions, and lead to a paradigm shift in medicine. One aim of the project is to try to understand the mind’s contribution to cancer recovery.
Project information
Project name
Bridging the gap between mind, brain and body: exosome role and monitoring (Mindgap)
Project manager at Linnaeus University
Ian Nicholls
Other project members
Gustaf Olsson, Subramanian Suriyanarayanan, Jesper Wiklander, Rashmi Mahajan
Participating organizations
Linnaeus University; Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto (head of project) and Instituto Português de Oncologia do Porto FG, EPE, Portugal; University of Oulu and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, Finland
Financier
Horizon 2020
Timetable
Jan 2019–Dec 2022
Subjects
Chemistry, medicine (Department of Chemistry and Biomedical Sciences, Faculty of Health and Life Sciences)
Website
Mindgap-fet-open.eu
Film
Mindgap explanation video
More about the project
The disruptive idea presented in this project is sustained by relevant data presented in the literature:
- Exosomes circulate throughout the body as messengers of health and disease, transporting genetic data to be delivered into a recipient cell.
- Exosomes are implicated in brain activity, having the ability to cross the blood brain barrier.
Thus, when exosomes circulate and exit the brain to peripheral cells, there is a message transported therein, which is related to its cargo inside the vesicle. Overall, we aim to know which cargo is related to health and which cargo is related to disease.
Traditionally, everyone has been looking for disease indicators to detect disease. Herein, we look for sensitive health indicators that may change under disease installation, therefore yielding an unprecedented early disease detection possibility.
Moreover, the possibility of using mindfulness mediation as a mind-related tool to control the cargo of exosomes is explored herein. If mediation is successful in changing the behaviour and attitudes of many people, fighting depression, etc, it means that the exosomes cargo may be changed through this process. Thus, this could be a major route to a self-healing approach before disease begins.
Finally, all this knowledge opens doors to an innovative device that may be used by everyone to understand his/her health status.
Overall, Mindgap targets ...
- the missing relation between the genetic data in exosomes and health status,
- interfacing this link with mind-related activities, and
- to create an innovative and portable device that tracks exosomes and analyses their relevant genetic data, thereby allowing each individual to correlate this information with their own health status and the installation of a pro-active attitude of each one of us against disease.
The project is part of the research in the research group the Bioorganic and Biophysical Chemistry Laboratory (BBCL), Linnaeus University Centre for Biomaterials Chemistry, and Linnaeus Knowledge Environment Advanced Materials.