The U.S. Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative is kicking off a new phase. In a road map published in November, it identified four research priorities for the next decade: integrating its databases, informing precision circuit therapies, understanding human neuroscience and advancing NeuroAI.
The plan shows a thoughtful effort to “protect a very important initiative,” says J. Anthony Movshon, professor of neural science and psychology at New York University—at a time when its future seems unsettled.
The BRAIN Initiative is co-led by the directors of the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke. But the NIMH has had an acting director since June 2024. Last month, the Trump administration terminated one of the initiative’s co-directors—Walter Koroshetz—from his role as director of the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke (the BRAIN Initiative is co-led by the directors of the National Institute of Mental Health and NINDS). And it is not clear whether the initiative will have sufficient funding or support to undertake this decade-long effort, says Joshua Sanes, professor emeritus of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard University and contributing editor for The Transmitter. “My guess is that if things continue politically the way they’re going now, [these goals] would not be accomplished in the United States in the next 10 years.”
Even if the BRAIN Initiative receives the amount of funding it is expecting, many neuroscientists are too busy grappling with the fallout of grant cancellations, hiring freezes and the loss of training programs to think about the future, says Eve Marder, university professor of biology at Brandeis University. “I’m talking to all these people who are struggling to keep their labs open.”
“You can have all the dreams in the universe,” but these big-picture speculations, which may require vast resources, are hard to reconcile with the erosion and destruction of academic science and training programs for young investigators, she adds. “It is difficult to look at a 10-year horizon, and [it] may be a waste of time and effort when we don’t know what is happening to science funding in the next year.”
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“This is a thoughtful document, but it came from a very different process,” Movshon says.
The document sets forth four priority areas, or “innovation domains.” The first tackles the expansion of the initiative’s large data consortia, including the BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network, the BRAIN Initiative Connectivity Across Scales, and the Brain Behavior Quantification and Synchronization Program. The data involved—genetic, cellular, functional and connectivity—have reached nearly 12 petabytes across nine disconnected repositories, Ngai says. Currently, researchers have to navigate multiple platforms to access and analyze related datasets.
“We’re eventually going to be in the range of exabytes,” Ngai says. “It’s not just the volume, but it’s also harmonizing [the data].” The goal is to integrate these siloed archives into a unified ecosystem along with an artificial-intelligence-powered search, according to the road map.
The second domain takes aim at the development of therapies that target circuits implicated in diseases. This focus is the clinical follow-up to the field’s concerted circuit-mapping efforts over the past 20 years, Sanes says. The goal, the report states, is to use that past work to identify specific circuits and translate neurotechnology tools to treat neurological and neuropsychiatric conditions—in part by facilitating collaborations among researchers, technology developers and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The initiative’s third domain aspires to translate knowledge from animal studies to humans and to optimize the adaptation of technologies across species. Neuroscience tools, which have been fragmented across species, “can be better coordinated to be better leveraged together to drive us to really cool, very important therapies for human brain disorders,” Ngai says. Through this coordination, the report states, the initiative aims to support first-in-human and early feasibility studies to test new technologies.
This domain is one of the most convincing parts of the proposal, three outside experts, including Sanes, told The Transmitter; human studies, Sanes adds, are “going to be the most exciting area of basic neuroscience research over the next decade.”
The final priority focuses on the fast-moving field of NeuroAI. The goal here is twofold: to understand the complexities of neural circuits using AI and to then use that information to develop better AI algorithms through data challenges and seed grants. But it’s unclear how much the BRAIN Initiative can innovate in this space, Movshon says, considering the already significant investment from industry.
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The road map also seems to be ambiguous about how the initiative can achieve these goals, Movshon says. “It doesn’t give you something to argue with.”
All in all, the roadmap seems scientifically reasonable, Movshon says, and it is helpful to have long-range goals that the field can look forward to and use as guides.
But feasibility is a big concern, Sanes says, given how the Trump administration has affected the initiative’s funding and scientific leadership. “The replacement of scientific leadership—in the FDA, CDC, NIH, HHS—with political leadership suggests that scientific criteria won’t be the ones primarily used in making funding decisions,” Sanes says.
From 2013 to 2023, the BRAIN Initiative grew into a $680-million program, but it has since sustained numerous cuts; its budget for fiscal year 2025 was $321 million. Congress has yet to finalize its budget for 2026, but, if passed, a budget bill proposed by the House and Senate appropriations committees this week would provide a 33 percent increase, or $108 million, over last year for the BRAIN Initiative.
“We’ll continue to do [the work] no matter what the level of funding is, but that will determine how broad a scope we can pursue,” Ngai says.
