Asya Rolls
Her recent work has highlighted how the brain's reward system is implicated in the placebo response and how brain-immune interactions can be harnessed to find and destroy tumors.[1] She worked in the Department of Psychiatry under the mentorship of Luis de Lecea and Craig Heller, exploring the impact of sleep on brain homeostasis and memory.[5] One innovation that the Rolls Lab pioneered is the merging of DREADDs technology with CyTOyF mass-cytometry to enable the high resolution measurements of the immune system after neuronal stimulation and inhibition.[10] Rolls found that using DREADDs to activate the ventral tegmental area reward circuitry lead to an increase in the innate and adaptive immune responses in mice upon exposure to bacterial insults.[12] In a recent impactful study, Rolls and her team demonstrated the brain's ability to encode and retrieve inflammatory responses in an immunotypic- and anatomic-specific manner.Using activity-dependent cell labelling, she showed that neuronal ensembles in the mouse insular cortex, which were active during two different models of inflammation (colitis and peritonitis), can recapitulate the specific inflammatory response, once reactivated.In addition, she proposed that the physiological trace storing immune-related information, the ‘‘immunengram’’, is distributed between the brain and memory cells residing in peripheral tissues.