BIOPHYSICAL SOCIETY NEWSLETTER
7
AUGUST
2014
erty, and developing regulatory and reimbursement
strategies,” Weingarten said in the release.
The 24 teams selected for the program will receive
supplemental funding from NIH to support entre-
preneurial training, mentorship, and collaboration
opportunities.
The application deadline for the first cohort is
August 7, 2014. More information can be found
at
14-261.html.
NIH Finds Focus for
BRAIN Initiative
The NIH Advisory Committee to the Director
(ACD) endorsed a new report calling for $4.5
billion in funding for brain research beginning in
2016. The report, which was requested by NIH
Director
Francis Collins
and prepared by a work-
ing group subcommittee of the ACD, lays out
the vision for NIH’s participation in the federal
Brain Research through Advancing Innovative
Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative. NIH
already announced an investment of $40 million in
fiscal year 2014 and President
Obama
has made a
request for $100 million for NIH’s component of
the initiative in his fiscal year 2015 budget.
The NIH efforts on the BRAIN Initiative will seek
to map the circuits of the brain, measure the fluc-
tuating patterns of electrical and chemical activity
flowing within those circuits, and understand how
their interplay creates our unique cognitive and
behavioral capabilities. The following scientific
goals were identified as high priorities for achieving
this vision:
• Identify and provide experimental access to
the different brain cell types to determine their
roles in health and disease.
• Generate circuit diagrams that vary in resolu-
tion from synapses to the whole brain.
• Produce a dynamic picture of the functioning
brain by developing and applying improved
methods for large-scale monitoring of neural
activity.
• Link brain activity to behavior with precise
interventional tools that change neural circuit
dynamics.
• Produce conceptual foundations for under-
standing the biological basis of mental pro-
cesses through development of new theoretical
and data analysis tools.
• Develop innovative technologies to under-
stand the human brain and treat its disorders;
create and support integrated brain research
networks.
• Integrate new technological and conceptual
approaches produced in the other goals to
discover how dynamic patterns of neural activ-
ity are transformed into cognition, emotion,
perception, and action in health and disease.
The Working Group proposes committing $400
million per year for fiscal years 2016-2020 to
focus on technology development and validation
and $500 million per year for years 2020-2025
to increasingly focus on the application of those
technologies in an integrated fashion to make
fundamental new discoveries about the brain. The
working group emphasized that its cost estimates
assume that the budget for the BRAIN Initiative
will supplement, not supplant, NIH’s existing in-
vestment in the broader spectrum of basic, transla-
tional, and clinical neuroscience research.
“While these estimates are provisional and subject
to congressional appropriations, they represent
a realistic estimate of what will be required for
this moon shot initiative,” said Collins in a press
release. “As the Human Genome Project did with
precision medicine, the BRAIN Initiative promises
to transform the way we prevent and treat devastat-
ing brain diseases and disorders while also spurring
economic development.”
The BRAIN Initiative is jointly led by NIH,
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of
the US Department of Defense, National Science
Foundation, and Food and Drug Administration.
