Speakers > Maxim Cazorla

Maxim Cazorla

Institut de Neurosciences de la Timone, Marseille, France

Maxim Cazorla is an INSERM principal investigator at the Institut de Neurosciences de la Timone in Marseille. Since 2020 he co-leads the Neurotech Center to promote the development of innovative and disruptive neurotechnologies to manipulate and record the brain at various scales. He received his PhD in Neuroscience from Paris Sorbonne University (2008), and completed postdoctoral trainings at Columbia University, New York (2012) and Institut Curie, Orsay (2015). With his team, he develops brain-on-a-chip systems and photoinductible technologies to study brain plasticity in health and disease.

Opto-electrical tools to manipulate brain connections on-demand

The adult brain has long been considered a rigid and aging organ. A new concept, known as brain rewiring, now postulates that neural circuits profoundly reorganize during learning, or following a stroke. Although elegant, this theory is difficult to demonstrate because of technological limitations. In this talk, I will present how a top-down approach led us to identify key cytoskeletal mechanism regulating axon remodeling in mature networks. Using this fundamental knowledge, our group recently developed a photoinducible technology named RAIL (Remodeling of Axons Induced by Light). This approach made it possible, for the first time, to modify the connectivity pattern of a neuronal network reconstituted in vitro on a chip. I will also discuss the next challenges of RAIL: How to organize newly-formed connections using weak electric fields, and how to implant this technology to living organisms.