In partnership with nine other Institutes and Centers (ICs), NINDS helps support and coordinate the NIH BRAIN Initiative. NIH received an additional $40 million in FY14 and will be allocated $25 million in FY15 to help support the BRAIN initiative. We are excited to play a role in this bold effort to accelerate the development and application of innovative technologies that will enable the broad neuroscience community to explore the fundamental principles of brain function and to understand the circuit dysfunction that underlies disorders of the central nervous system. The novel scientific directions, concepts, and tools coming from the BRAIN Initiative’s emphasis on cross-disciplinary collaboration will lead to new ways of doing science.
Toward achieving these goals, NINDS and the other BRAIN ICs collaborated with the National Science Foundation (NSF) to convene a BRAIN Initiative Investigators Kickoff Meeting on November 20th and 21st, 2014. Over 200 participants, including representatives from nearly all of the first 56 NIH-funded BRAIN Initiative awards and approximately 30 investigators with NSF EAGER awards, gathered to meet and interact with each other to identify potential areas of research coordination and collaboration. Meeting attendees arrived eager to learn from one another and build partnerships to help ensure that the whole of the BRAIN Initiative is bigger than the sum of its parts. Their enthusiasm was palpable!
NIH Director Francis Collins addressed the group, highlighting the fact that the BRAIN Initiative is more of an interagency effort than any previous NIH initiative and urged the participants to "roll up your sleeves, plunge in, and get into the science as best you can, as boldly as you can."
Dr. Gerry Rubin from the Janelia Research Campus gave a keynote address that laid out how modern techniques are enabling unprecedented detailed structure function studies in Drosophila.
In this trans-agency collaboration, we were fortunate to have presentations conveying the missions and funding opportunities of NIH, NSF, and three Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) projects: SUBNETS, RAM and Neuro-FAST, as they relate to the BRAIN Initiative. We look forward to coordinating across all the federal agencies participating in the Initiative, including the Food and Drug Administration and the Intelligence Applied Research Project Activity (IARPA), and as we move forward we hope to engage a variety of industry partners in BRAIN’s neurotechnology development efforts.
Importantly, this meeting presented the first opportunity for BRAIN Initiative investigators to share their research plans with one another, develop and strengthen cross-project collaborations, and communicate to granting agency staff what might help them succeed in the coming years. The BRAIN initiative will not be business as usual - early sharing of tools and data will be the norm, and we hope the conversation from this inaugural meeting will help lay the groundwork for a shared approach. Working together, the BRAIN investigators can advance science more rapidly and efficiently than one could ever hope to do by working as independent units. Simply put, the goals of this Initiative are so ambitious and high profile that we must create new ways to coordinate at every opportunity and at every level—from research teams to government funding agencies.
In an effort to expose common challenges and identify potential solutions to issues that span funding opportunities and agencies, investigators and staff gathered for breakout sessions designed to explore crosscutting issues relating to: Data Management, Integrating Approaches and Bridging Scales, and Technology Implementation.
Together, the group highlighted the following anticipated challenges and recommendations for moving forward:
- In considering Data Management, investigators laid out the challenges to sharing and standardizing data, particularly across scientific modalities and model organisms. They suggested investigators and agencies consider how best to prioritize and organize data sharing. They proposed that the first step is to establish meta-data standards for annotating different types of datasets so that they could be useful to others. The group discussed different options for establishing repositories that would enable broader access to the very large datasets produced by BRAIN investigators.
- The group discussion on Integrating Approaches and Bridging Scales noted potential obstacles in connecting data collected at molecular, cellular, and macro-structure scales – as well as correctly interpreting across these scales to establish causal relationships. To address these issues, the group emphasized the importance of theoretical, modeling, and data analysis experiments, and stressed increasing accessibility to techniques and model systems.
- Conversations on Technology Implementation highlighted current shortcomings of neuro-transcriptomics and human imaging data acquisition and analysis, as well as a need to overcome barriers in therapeutic translation. The participants proposed central storage for data and state-of-the-art techniques, pre-publication data sharing, commercial partnerships to support translation, and noted the importance of community input for project planning.
In order for the scientific community to take the next leap forward in understanding the fundamental principles of neuroscience and create technologies that can be applied to myriad neurological disorders, we must synergize the integrated efforts of diverse scientists, ICs, and federal agencies toward a new culture of collaboration. At NINDS, we look forward to working with the other NIH ICs, as well as our federal partners, to support BRAIN Initiative awardees so that they are able to take bold strides in their research to unlock our understanding of the brain and neurologic disease.