The Advisory Committee to the NIH Director BRAIN Working Group recently published an article in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B that discusses how the NIH BRAIN Initiative aims to produce neurotechnologies and tools that will support giant leaps forward in neuroscience research. Prior to the announcement of the first NIH-funded grants for BRAIN in September, the neuroscience experts who comprise the Working Group published the report “BRAIN 2025: A Scientific Vision” to help guide efforts at NIH relating to BRAIN. Convening these experts and gathering input from the broader community has enabled NIH to map a bold strategy to capitalize on each opportunity, milestone, and goal for the 12-year Initiative.
The Royal Society article expounds on the central goal of the report – to speed development of neurotechnologies to better understand the anatomy, activity, and functions of circuits in the brain. In addition to summarizing the seven research priority areas identified as crucial for achieving this goal, the authors provide examples of some of the types of questions the products of BRAIN might enable us to answer:
- Can we target specific human cell types to develop new therapies for neurological and psychiatric disorders?
- What changes in circuits accompany, and perhaps cause, age-related cognitive decline?
- What patterns of neural activity in which brain structures correspond to human emotional states?
After synthesizing the core principles to guide the success of The BRAIN InitiativeSM over the next decade, the authors note that, given the parallel efforts of nations around the world, and the growing momentum of neuroscience discoveries in the past 50 years, exploring the fundamentals of the human brain is certain to transform our understanding of ourselves – in health and disease – to benefit everyone in society.