First NIH Grant Awards in BRAIN Initiative

September 30, 2014 | This morning, the NIH announced the recipients of its first round of grants tied to the nationwide BRAIN Initiative, totaling $46 million in funding for research meant to develop an integrated understanding of human brain function. A total of 58 grants have been awarded, for projects like a UC Berkeley effort led by John Ngai to perform transcriptome profiling of single neurons in order to catalogue the types of cells active in the brain. Research institutions who have announced grants under the BRAIN Initiative include UC Berkeley, Washington University in St. Louis, Princeton, and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

The NIH is one of four federal agencies providing funds to the BRAIN Initiative, including DARPA, the National Science Foundation, and the FDA.

President Obama also plans to announce a scale-up of the BRAIN Initiative in its second year to a $200 million pledge from the federal government, supplemented with new sources of private funding. The New York Times reports that organizations including Google, General Electric, and the Simons Foundation are expected to contribute a total of $270 million in 2015 to projects that will support the BRAIN Initiative's goals.

NIH Director Francis Collins has proposed that the Institutes will contribute $4.5 billion to the BRAIN Initiative over 12 years. “There’s a big gap between what we want to do in brain research and the technologies available to make exploration possible,” Collins said in a press release announcing the new grants. “These initial awards are part of a 12-year scientific plan focused on developing the tools and technologies needed to make the next leap in understanding the brain.”