The National Institutes of Health recently said it will fund a total of $169 million for 110 new awards for the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative.
“Understanding the way the brain processes information and how it lays down memories and retrieves them will be instrumental for understanding brain health, and ultimately, preventing brain disease,” NIH Director Francis Collins said in a release. “These awards add to work already underway to give us a high-resolution picture of the circuits and networks in the brain, how they work, and where they can go wrong.”
The BRAIN Initiative was initiated in 2013 as a way to push the boundaries of neuroscience research. The initiative seeks to study a variety of brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia, autism, epilepsy, and traumatic brain injury, the release said. In the program’s first few year, it has already led to maps of whole brains in action and the ability to identify thousands of brain cells at once, among other successes.
“Thanks to the rapid advances in neuroscience research, the BRAIN Initiative is entering a new phase, as we fully fund groundbreaking projects that were exploratory just a few years ago,” Dr. Walter Koroshetz, director of NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, said in the release. “The imaginative science performed in individual laboratories remains the backbone of BRAIN, but the neuroscience community now has the unique opportunity to take on groundbreaking projects that can only be completed by teams of scientists working together.”
