In separate publications, co-chair of the Advisory Committee to the NIH Director for The BRAIN InitiativeSM, Dr. Cori Bargmann, and the current Society for Neuroscience president, Dr. Steve Hyman, outline how projects funded through the Initiative are already paying off only two years following the bold cross-disciplinary effort’s launch.
As NIH prepares to announce the second set of BRAIN Initiative awardees in the fall of 2015, two recent publications highlight how the effort has already dramatically influenced the scientific community – and promises to expand our fundamental understanding of the brain and advance medicine for years to come.
On July 21st, 2015, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published a viewpoint by Dr. Cori Bargmann of Rockefeller University. Dr. Bargmann, who co-chaired the working group that developed the BRAIN 2025 report and is currently a member of the BRAIN Multi-Council Working Group, discusses the opportunity for neuroscience advancements to influence how we understand and treat brain disorders. Describing the circuit perspective for brain function, Bargmann highlights how multiple, novel tools and technologies are revealing new views of cellular, circuit, and cortical brain activity. Dr. Bargmann then goes on to illustrate how such findings promise to provide new insights into how the brain functions in health and disease, a primary goal of The BRAIN InitiativeSM.
Further delineating the impressive impact of the fledgling initiative, Society for Neuroscience (SfN) president, Dr. Steve Hyman (Broad Institute at MIT/Harvard) comments on the potential for return on investment in the July 31, 2015 issue of the SfN publication Neuroscience Quarterly. Dr. Hyman describes the outcomes of multiple projects from the first wave of investigators funded by the initiative, noting that the success of these early efforts builds a foundation for future scientific achievements that will provide data and resources to benefit researchers across disciplines, as well as improve our knowledge of neurological disorders.