UK’s answer to DARPA wants to rewire the human brain

Developed in the United Kingdom Research and Innovation Agency (ARIA). Established in 2023 With the aim of achieving “high risk, high reward” successes in sectors ranging from support Food security To new ways of intensification Human immunity.

With more than £1 billion (about $1.3 billion) of government funding allocated between now and 2030, one of ARIA’s most ambitious programs is A £69 million initiative It aims to develop more detailed methods for modifying the human brain. The hope is to eventually treat a whole range of disorders, from epilepsy to Alzheimer’s disease.

Reports have previously estimated that this group of neurological conditions is costing the UK economy Tens of billions of dollars every year. According to ARIA Program Director Jack Carolan, the unifying link is that they are all disorders of brain circuits.

“Sometimes there are circuits that are overly connected, and not connected enough, and there are different areas of the brain that are working, and there are different types of cells,” Carolan said, speaking during the WIRED Health conference in London on April 16. “Our current suite of interventions doesn’t have the precision we need. The vision of the program is: ‘Can we build more precise neurotechnologies to interact at the circuit level?’”

To date, ARIA’s broad approach to this particular lunar project has led to funding for 19 different teams. They are working on ideas ranging from using ultrasound as a new way to “bio-profile” a specific patient’s brain, to unique methods of deep brain stimulation that can protect and rejuvenate different areas of the brain.

At WIRED Health, Carolan highlighted the potential of ultrasound techniques to not only modify the brain, but to allow scientists to gain new information about a particular patient’s brain circuits. One of the ARIA-funded teams at Imperial College London is Work on the project Combining ultrasound with gene therapy to try to image gene expression in real time in neurons, which may enable scientists to get a more detailed picture of why certain brain networks are dysfunctional.

Over the past 25 yearsThe idea of ​​implanting electrodes deep inside the brain and using them to stimulate a specific area, known as the basal ganglia, has emerged as a new treatment for patients with advanced forms of Parkinson’s disease. It has provided a new means of managing motor symptoms when drug treatments are no longer effective. Carolan claims that in the future similar approaches could be used for a range of other debilitating neurological conditions, a concept he sees as the future of neurotherapy.

“What people have discovered is that the same technology can actually be used to potentially treat things like depression, addiction, epilepsy, and a whole series of incurable conditions,” he said. “It’s proof that we can have platform technologies that can address a wide range of conditions.”

Given the lofty nature of ARIA’s goals, many have asked how to evaluate whether its programs ultimately succeed or fail. But as Kathleen Fisher, CEO of ARIA, noted in WIRED Health, there may be downstream benefits to these research investments that are completely unexpected.

Fisher, who previously worked at DARPA, the US Department of Defense agency after which ARIA was modeled, pointed to the high-impact potential of early government investments. In 2013, DARPA awarded a grant of up to $25 million to facilitate the development of vaccine platforms that can be developed at unprecedented speed.

“That company was Moderna,” Fisher recalls. “That technology was mRNA, a technology that came online just in time for Covid.” These vaccines subsequently continued to be rolled out to save countless deaths during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Fisher’s goal is that by the early 2030s, ARIA will have already begun to show “seedlings of societal impact” either in its brain research, or in another area of ​​focus, making it a no-brainer for the UK government to renew the agency’s funding.

“We may be starting to see experiments that show that we can do interventions at the circuit level in a way that does not require surgery,” Fisher said. “Are we going to come all the way in seven years? Maybe not, but we could have enough evidence that it will be possible.”