Hello, good afternoon.

It's for me a great pleasure to introduce to you Anna Martin Villalba, originally from

Spain but now in Germany for a number of years.

She's actually the director of the Cancer Center in Heidelberg.

As you know, Heidelberg is one of these universities where research in math, math biology, biological

research oriented to mathematics has been more active in Europe in the last decades.

I had the opportunity to collaborate, we had the opportunity to collaborate with Heidelberg

for many years now through different European projects that at the time Professor Willi

Jagger was leading in applied mathematics. Now there is another younger colleague there,

Anna Marciniak that you probably know, so that is a very strong tradition. Anna is in the biological

side of this big Heidelberg expertise. She's a prominent researcher in neurobiology and in

particular in oncology and she's also interested in aging. This is a big topic in Europe where

now we are getting older and older, the life expectation is getting longer but the challenge

is to get there in a healthy manner, both physically and mentally. So the lecture today,

well you see already the picture which is very nice, so well you can try also to guess what the

picture means. Is this what, is this an oceanic image of some strange jellyfish living 8,000

kilometers deep in the sea? Well I've never been there so I don't know. Have you ever been 8 kilometers

deep? No, okay. In Brazil, in Brazil there is a lot of sea. Maybe you have been, did you ever go very

deep in the submarine? No, always in the surface right? Yeah, very good. So I don't know what it is

but she will tell us about this. Actually the the title of her talk is very intriguing and inspiring,

unlocking stiffness to harness regeneration. Thank you, thank you Ana for visiting us.

Yeah so thank you Enrique for the invitation which was a very difficult, it's not the kind of

talks that I'm used to give. You know I'm trained as a medical doctor and I ended up doing some

biology of how to regenerate. This means how to repair your brain or how to avoid cancer.

When you drink alcohols in the party last night, this is my field and where I feel secure and I'm

going to tell you about mathematics and where the opportunities lie behind this biology. So

bear in mind that I'm not a mathematician. I'm just giving you some examples and please also

interrupt if there's a concept that I take for granted and you are not aware of. So this picture

so this picture I told chat GPT Dali to give me something that will represent an astrocyte.

Astrocytes in the brain is like one of the most numerous cells that we have. So if you if you

think of a brain of a mouse, the mouse has more neurons than astrocytes. But when we move to humans

we have more astrocytes than neurons. So astrocytes are the cells even if you work on neuronal

networks and you think that this is the neuron, the neuron is the unit of information. In real life

astrocytes connect 200 neurons. So they are really important and some of these astrocytes here

they home to a very specialized region in the brain and they gain the ability to generate progeny.

And this is what we call stemness. Stemness is that when you have that you can generate neurons

that you can generate. So just imagine you have a neural network and why are these specific

newborn neurons in our adult brains important? They are important because they are flexible units.

So if you have a mature neuron you have a negative current and this is going to be

inhibitory GABA. If you have an immature neuron then you place it into a circuit and then

the negative current is going to be positive. And this is something that we normally use. We need

these neurons in our brains, these stem cells in our brains. When you are listening to my talk

and we have something like the working memory. So this means what can you remember five minutes later?

And to have these new circuits running you need these immature elements in your circuit

and this makes it flexible. This is for example when you enter home you leave your keys

and five minutes later you don't know where these keys are. So if you do these kind of

experiments in mice, if we block this new generation of neurons for a long time and we

lack these immature elements then we lose this kind of short term memory. So this is why these

stem cells in our brains are important and I'm going to tell you about them.

And to explain you also not only what they do in physiology but what they can do also