Duke researchers have been given almost $3 million as part of the first wave of President Obama's Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies initiative.
On Sept. 30, the National Institutes of Health announced the first $46 million of BRAIN funding that will go towards 100 projects across 15 states and several countries. Two projects at Duke have received more than $1.4 million each over the next three years. The overall aim of the BRAIN initiative is to develop innovative technologies to advance the study of the human brain and treatments for brain disorders. In total, the initiative will distribute $110 million in research funding.
“There are so many secrets of the human brain and so many diseases involving the human brain,” said Chunlei Liu, assistant professor of radiology at the School of Medicine and the leader of the one of the teams. “It’s not just that we don’t have ways to treat them—we don’t even have ways to understand them."
The BRAIN initiative will make hundreds of millions of dollars available to researchers studying the human brain through both public and private funding. One of the major goals of the initiative is to conduct research into brain diseases such as Alzheimer's disease and post traumatic stress disorder. The project has been compared to the Human Genome Project in scope and scale.
Liu and his team of collaborators from the University of California Berkley, the University of California San Francisco and Harvard University submitted a grant application last year that was reviewed by the NIH. A group of projects, including Liu's, were given grant money and announced during a Sept. 30 White House conference for the BRAIN initiative. Liu aims to develop what he calls the next generation of MRI technology in order to examine how the brain works in more detail and with much higher resolution than current MRI techniques allow.
"Without knowing the causes behind these diseases, it’s hard to develop the right treatment strategies, so the key thing is the lack of technology," Liu said.
Liu noted that after the BRAIN funding for the project runs out in three years, a decision will be made as to whether the technology is practical enough to continue research.
The other Duke research team receiving funding is led by Allen Song, professor and director of the Duke-UNC Brain Imaging and Analysis Center. Song said that his project will focus on developing brain imaging technology that can accurately and non-invasively capture neuron activities in space and in time.
“Over the long term, we will utilize the record dynamic maps of brain activities to construct various networks in the brain and hopefully fill the gap between brain activity and human behavior,” Song wrote in an email Thursday.
The BRAIN initiative holds much promise for the brain science community because it brings together not just traditional neuroscientists, but researchers, engineers and physicists from various backgrounds, Liu explained.
“I think that’s the part of this initiative that will make a big difference,” Liu said. “All these people are starting to work together to solve very fundamental problems that impact not only science but also people’s everyday lives."
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