The BRAIN Initiative, run by the National Institute of Health (USA), has granted a project for the first time in Spain. Pedro Ramos-Cabrer, from our center, will collaborate, in conjunction with Biocruces Bizkaia Health Research Institute, in a two-year project leaded by Achucarro Basque Center for Neuroscience, to unveil novel genetic tools for full brain scale integrated activity mapping with MRI, using genetically-encoded magnetic indicators (GEMIs). The project will consolidate an interdisciplinary partnership that covers synthetic biology, MRI data acquisition and analyses.
The NIH, the funding agency for the BRAIN Initiative has granted 300.000 euros for the launch of this exploratory project that expects to reach the objectives by mid-2022.
The BRAIN Initiative supports technology-driven innovative research projects that can have a transformational impact on unlocking some of the mysteries of the brain. Beyond basic research, the ambitious project also aims to open unique opportunities to test and track the effect of therapeutics on brain-wide circuit dynamics for the treatment and cure of circuit-related brain dysfunctions, thus providing immense potentials to tackle various human brain diseases in the future. Ikerbasque Professor at CIC biomaGUNE Dr. Pedro Ramos Cabrer highlights the importance of having an 11.7 tesla magnetic resonance scanner, "like the one we have in our Molecular Imaging Unit".
To understand how the brain generates the different variety of neuro-biological phenomena, it is necessary to reveal the large-scale “activation patterns” of all brain circuits implied during learning, and their evolution in time while interacting with other circuits. To reach this goal, the major challenge is to track the activity of all the cells in the entire brain while performing specific tasks, yet no existing technologies have achieved that goal. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) allows recording blood-oxygenation dynamics of the entire brain, but with the major drawback of not being capable to measure directly variations of neural activity. The fMRI is thus “blind” to brain activity and functional maps have very poor spatial resolution, without any knowledge on the specific cell types and circuits that participate during experience over time. New MRI-based technologies are needed to “directly” visualize cellular activity maps of the entire brain during learning experiences.