30 September 2014—The Obama administration has announced that US$270 million in new funds from private institutions—including businesses, universities and charitable foundations—will be pumped into its Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative. Some US$30 million of the added funding will come from a newly formed, multidisciplinary Photonics Industry Neuroscience Group, assembled by the National Photonics Initiative (NPI) to drive optics and photonics solutions to neuroscience challenges. The announcements came at a conference organized by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).
The ultimate goal of the BRAIN Initiative, originally unveiled in April 2013, is to create technologies that will help scientists and medical professionals find new ways to treat, cure and prevent brain disorders like Alzheimer’s disease, epilepsy, autism and traumatic brain injury. The OSTP meeting’s stated purpose was “to celebrate the progress being made by the Federal government, universities and research institutes, foundations, the private sector, and others” to advance the initiative’s goals. “One of our nation's next great frontiers,” quipped White House Science Advisor John Holdren at the meeting, “is the three pounds of mass between our ears.”
In the year and one-half since its inception, the BRAIN Initiative has particularly highlighted the role that optical tools and techniques, such as in vivo microscopy and optogenetics, will play in taking some of the important next steps in brain research. The new NPI industry group—which includes U.S. industry leaders in optics and photonics—aims to expand on those foundations. The group will focus its US$30 million in research funding over the next three years on a number of specific areas, including:
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developing imaging optics, laser sources, automated scanning technology and high-resolution cameras to provide a 10- to 100-fold increase in the capability to image groups of thousands of active neurons;
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creating miniature, affordable and portable/implantable microscopes;
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fashioning a new generation of fluorescent indicators of neural activity, using large-scale, high-throughput protein engineering technology; and
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developing automated software for detailed mapping of the human brain and its activity from 3-D MRI, CT and microscopic data sets.
The contribution of the new Photonics Industry Neuroscience Group was one of several auspicious announcements for BRAIN Initiative funding that came during the day. The Obama administration also revealed that a number of major foundations, patient advocacy organizations and universities, including the Simons Foundation and the University of Pittsburgh, have agreed to “align” more than US$240 million of their research spending to efforts covered by the BRAIN Initiative, across a wide swath of areas in basic, translational and clinical neuroscience. These efforts come on top of the administration’s own federal budget request to double the BRAIN Initiative allocation for three key agencies from US$100 million in fiscal 2014 to US$200 million in fiscal 2015. And the U.S. National Institutes of Health announced US$46 million in new BRAIN-related grant awards, focusing on tools and techniques.
Elizabeth Rogan, the CEO of The Optical Society (OSA), and OSA Past President Tom Baer, the head of the NPI Steering Committee, were invited to the OSTP event. OSA has actively supported the BRAIN Initiative since its inception in 2013. “OSA creates opportunities to connect the academic and industry sectors because each play an important role in understanding and developing needed technology solutions,” said Rogan. “The White House event today is a unique chance to build on the progress made by the NPI.” Baer added that the new NPI industry group is “truly the first of its kind—a multidisciplinary industry consortium” focused specifically on the BRAIN Initiative and its goals.