White House unveils brain research initiative

President Obama has announced a new research effort to improve understanding of the human brain and uncover new ways to treat, prevent, and cure disorders like Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, autism, epilepsy, and traumatic brain injury. The initiative, known as Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN ), will be funded at $110 million in the administration’s fiscal year 2014 budget request.

The interdisciplinary program will be managed jointly by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Institutes of Health, and NSF. Some $50 million will come from DARPA, $40 million from NIH, and $20 million from NSF, according to the White House. Private foundations also will contribute to the initiative: The Allen Institute for Brain Science has pledged $60 million a year, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute has committed $30 million annually, and the Kavli Foundation is putting up $4 million a year for 10 years. The Salk Institute has pledged a total of $28 million to the initiative.

“We have a chance to improve the lives of not just millions, but billions of people on this planet through the research that’s done in this BRAIN Initiative,” Obama said during a White House ceremony. “Imagine if no family had to feel helpless watching a loved one disappear behind the mask of Parkinson’s or struggle in the grip of epilepsy. Imagine if we could reverse traumatic brain injury or PTSD for our veterans who are coming home. Imagine if someone with a prosthetic limb can now play the piano or throw a baseball as well as anybody else, because the wiring from the brain to that prosthetic is direct and triggered by what’s already happening in the patient’s mind.”

DARPA director Arati Prabhakar told reporters that the program will strive to create new physical tools, measurement control tools, and models of the brain. The agency has been sponsoring brain research focused on healing “wounded warriors"— soldiers who have suffered traumatic brain injuries, endured post-traumatic stress disorder and associated memory loss, or lost limbs and dealt with the currently limited prosthetics, she said. Researchers supported by DARPA have fitted a quadriplegic volunteer with brain implants that directly read her neural signals to control a sophisticated prosthetic arm, an advance that Prabhakar said was “inconceivable a few years ago.”

“We will need to have bioengineers, computer scientists, neuroscientists, people who understand physics and chemistry,” said NIH director Francis Collins. “The brain is about all of those things, and it will take a coordinated effort to map out exactly what the timetables and deliverables should be.” Although initial year funding pales in comparison to the $5.5 billion NIH alone devotes annually to neuroscience research, Collins noted that the multibillion-dollar Human Genome Project, which sequenced the 3 billion base pairs of human DNA, had a first-year budget of $27 million.