Biophysical Newsletter - August 2014

7

BIOPHYSICAL SOCIETY NEWSLETTER

2014

AUGUST

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 http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/pa-files/PAR- 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.