WCN 2019 Plenary Lecture

The Promise of the Brain Initiative^© for Those with Neuro/Mental/Substance Abuse Disorders

Walter Koroshetz, USA
National Institute of Health, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, Bethesda, USA.

The US Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies is a research program focused on building fundamental knowledge of how brain circuits process information to enable human behaviour.

Research began in 2014 and considerable progress has occurred to open up extraordinary research possibilities for understanding the circuits underlying animal and human behaviour. These pose new opportunities for dissecting the circuits that underlie neuro/mental/substance abuse disorders. BRIAN Initiative research has already included advances in brain recording and stimulation for neuro/mental health disorders such as closed-loop stimulation for Parkinson's, Essential Tremor and Epilepsy. However, it's major impact will come from the application of technologies to patients that are now in animal studies. These will include new brain activity monitoring techniques to serve as diagnostic readouts of neural circuits.

New therapies will come from genomic-enabled precision modulation of specific brain cell types by chemicals, electromagnetic, ultrasound energy or other controlling technologies.

In addition to the US program complimentary programs in Europe, the Human Brain Project, Japan (BRAIN/MINDS), Korea, Australia and soon China will add to this scientific revolution. In the past Neurology has been built off of neuropathology and neuroanatomy with the patient's symptoms/deficits presumed due to interruption of these static features. The BRAIN Initiatives will bring the previously invisible dynamic features of brain circuits into Neurology, Psychiatry and Neurosurgery.