With over £1 billion (about $1.3 billion) of government funding between now and 2030, one of ARIA’s most ambitious programs is a £69 million initiative aimed at developing more tailored ways of modulating the human brain. The hope is to eventually address a whole range of disorders from epilepsy to Alzheimer’s.
Reports previously estimated that this set of neurological conditions cost the UK economy billions of dollars each year. According to ARIA program director Jacques Carolan, the unifying link is that these are all disorders of brain circuitry.
“Sometimes there are circuits that are overconnected, that are underconnected, there are different brain areas that are functioning, different types of cells,” said Carolan, speaking at WIRED Health in London on April 16.
So far, ARIA’s broad-brush approach to this particular moonshot has seen them fund 19 different teams. They are working on ideas ranging from the use of ultrasound as a new way to “biotype” a particular patient’s brain to unique methods of deep brain stimulation that can both protect and regenerate different areas of the brain.
At WIRED Health, Carolan highlighted the potential of ultrasound technologies not only to organize the brain, but also to allow scientists to gain new information about the brain’s circuitry in a particular patient. An ARIA-funded team at Imperial College London is working on a project combining ultrasound and gene therapy to image gene expression in neurons in real time, potentially enabling scientists to get a more detailed picture of why certain brain networks are malfunctioning.
Over the past 25 years, the idea of implanting electrodes deep within the brain and using them to stimulate a specialized area called the basal ganglia has emerged as a novel treatment for patients with advanced forms of Parkinson’s disease. This has provided a new opportunity for the management of motor symptoms when drug treatment no longer works. Carolan claims that similar approaches could be used in the future for other debilitating neurological conditions, a concept he sees as the future of neurotherapeutics.
“What people have found is that the same technology can actually be used to treat potentially serious things like depression, addiction, epilepsy and a number of complex conditions,” he said. “This is proof that we can have platform technologies that can address a wide variety of situations.”
Given the lofty nature of ARIA’s goals, many have questioned how to evaluate whether its programs ultimately succeed or fail. But as ARIA CEO Kathleen Fisher explained in WIRED Health, these research investments may also have downstream benefits that are completely unexpected.
Fischer, who previously worked at DARPA, the US Department of Defense agency on which ARIA is modeled, noted 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 could be developed at unprecedented speed.
“That company was Moderna,” Fischer recalled. “That technology was mRNA, the technology that came online just in time for COVID.” The subsequent implementation of these vaccines saved countless deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Fisher aims that by the early 2030s, ARIA will begin to show “germs of social impact” in its brain research or another area of focus, making it easier for the UK government to renew the agency’s funding.
“It may be that we are starting to see trials that show that we can [brain] “Circuit-level intervention will be done in a way that won’t require surgery,” Fischer said. “Will we get everything done in seven years? “Probably not, but we may have enough evidence that it’s going to be possible.”
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