President Obama is calling on neuroscientists inside and outside of the federal government to join an ambitious effort to understand and map the activity of the human brain.
If successful, this basic science work could lay the foundation for effective treatment and prevention strategies for many neurologic and psychiatric diseases.
Right now, scientists are able to study individual neurons and can identify the main function of certain areas of the brain, but the underlying causes of most neurologic and psychiatric diseases are still largely unknown.
"There’s this enormous mystery waiting to be unlocked," President Obama said during a speech at the White House on April 2. "The BRAIN Initiative will change that by giving scientists the tools they need to get a dynamic picture of the brain in action and better understand how we think, how we learn, and how we remember. That knowledge will be transformative."
Dr. Francis S. Collins
The Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative is part of President Obama’s fiscal year 2014 budget proposal and seeks to invest $100 million to accelerate the development of technologies to better understand human brain function.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) plans to spend about $40 million on the project in 2014 and will build upon the work already underway as part of the agency’s Blueprint for Neuroscience Research, which coordinates activities across its 15 institutes and centers. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will contribute $50 million. The DARPA activities will focus on developing new tools to capture and process dynamic neural and synaptic activities. The rest of the federal funding will come from the National Science Foundation. The agency plans to support research advances across biology, the physical sciences, engineering, computer science, and social and behavioral sciences.
Exactly how the money will be spent is unclear. But the NIH is creating a working group that will be cochaired by Dr. Cornelia Bargmann of Rockefeller University, New York, and Dr. William Newsome of Stanford (Calif.) University to spell out the goals of the BRAIN Initiative. The working group will present a preliminary plan later this year and deliver a final report in June 2014.
"This initiative is an idea whose time has come," said NIH Director Francis Collins.
While the $100 million investment is less than 1% of the NIH’s total annual funding, Dr. Collins said the initiative is a "strong start out of the gate."
The federal agencies won’t be the only players in the new BRAIN Initiative. At least four private foundations are making significant financial investments in brain mapping, including the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Allen Institute for Brain Science, the Kavli Foundation, and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
It was some of these same private organizations that originally brought forward the idea to systematically map the human brain. In September 2011, scientists from the Kavli Foundation, the Allen Institute, and the Gatsby Charitable Foundation met in the United Kingdom and formed the idea. After that, they held a series of meetings and produced a white paper before catching the attention of the White House.
The attention of the federal government and the president in particular, is "energizing," said Dr. R. Clay Reid, the senior investigator for neural coding at the Allen Institute. The BRAIN Initiative will help accelerate the activity already underway and kick start the next series of technological advances in nanotechnology and advanced optics that will give neuroscientists the tools they need to make new discoveries, he said.
"It’s building enabling technologies that will push the entire field forward," Dr. Reid said in an interview.
The basic science initiative won’t lead to immediate clinical advances, said Christof Koch, Ph.D., the chief scientific officer at the Allen Institute. But the next clinical application is likely to be in the area of prosthetics. The discoveries that come out of the BRAIN Initiative will help enable better communication between patients’ brain and their prosthetics, he said.
Further off, however, are advances in such diseases as Parkinson’s and autism. "We’re not going to see in the next couple of years significant in-roads into those pathologies," Dr. Koch said in an interview. "We will understand them ultimately, but it will take time."
Dr. Daniel G. Amen, a psychiatrist and an expert in using brain scans as part of psychiatric treatment, said the launch of the BRAIN Initiative is also good news for the field of psychiatry.
"It’s great to have the president of the United States saying the brain is important," he said in an interview.