Offering a scientific wake-up call to the medical world, Asya Rolls is uncovering how our brain, our sleep, and our state of mind can seriously impact our well-being and our ability to heal.
Assist. Prof. Asya Rolls of the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine is at the cutting edge of neuroimmunology. Mindful of global research, Rolls is pioneering the understanding of how our state of mind can impact the body’s ability to heal itself. Uncovering the medical impact of phenomena such as sleep deprivation and its impact on the immune systemת the research promises a new dimension in medical care.
More than 100 million people suffer from sleep disorders. Over the last five years, there have been amazing improvements in neuroscience tools. Now, scientists can regulate specific neurons by remote control (for example with light) in order to deepen their understanding of how neural circuits mediate and synchronize physiology.
Using these tools Assist. Prof. Rolls aims to understand how the sleeping and the awake brain influences the immune system. “If we can understand how the brain does this and which neural networks are used, we can use this knowledge to harness the brain’s therapeutic potential and reduce drug dosages and side effects,” says Rolls. “There is an amazing impact of the brain on the immune System,” says Rolls, who is now looking into this phenomenon in patients before bone marrow transplantations. “The brain is a powerful and potent factor in recovery,” she states, “but we have no idea exactly how it works in regulating the immune system and effecting recovery.”
Cognitive deficits, attention deficits, cancer, blood pressure heart disease, stroke, obesity, diabetes and mood disorders are all
associated with too much or too little sleep.
During postdoctoral work at Stanford University, Rolls and her colleagues showed that sleep-deprivation in mice can reduce the efficiency of bone marrow transplantation by half. Assist. Prof. Asya Rolls received a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2008; a Rothschild Fellowship in 2009; the Clore Foundation’s Women in Science Award in 2009, and the NARSAD young investigator award 2010.