The European Commission has just approved 38 million euros that will support the state-of-the-art digital brain research infrastructure EBRAINS (European Brain Research Infrastructures) over the next three years (until 2026), a joint research platform to advance neuroscience and brain health improve. This is the main legacy of the Human Brain Project (HBP), a colossal challenge also funded by the EU – which contributed two-thirds of its €600 million budget – and launched last September amid uncertainty about the prospects of the Neuroscience was completed in Europe. In its decade of development, it achieved groundbreaking advances in this discipline as well as medical and technological applications against Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia and blindness, among others.
The decision was announced by the coordinators of the initiative, which will now be renamed EBRAINS 2.0. As Katrin Amunts, scientific director of the HBP, explained to this newspaper last November, EBRAINS is a platform available to researchers around the world that “enables the development of simulations at the molecular, cellular, neural network or whole brain level.” Perform analysis in supercomputers or neuromorphic computing devices.
“Large collaborative projects that share data and digital tools have become a feature of this phase of neuroscience, which has been consolidated as a paradigm that we call digital neuroscience,” Amunts, who led the letter, now describes the successful ones via email EBRAINS 2.0 proposal. “Its common characteristic is that it relies heavily on large and complex data, managed and accessible through powerful mainframe resources enabled by EBRAINS 2.0.” “This is a critical advance that allows us to derive insights from different scales and aspects of the immensely complex organization of the brain,” says Amunts, professor at the Cécile and Oskar Vogt Institute for Brain Research at the University of Düsseldorf and director of the Institute for Neuroscience and Jülich Research Center for Medicine.
Personalized brain medicine
The overall goal of the project is to collectively deepen knowledge of the structure and function of this organ to enable new advances in brain medicine, technology and informatics. EBRAINS 2.0 also aims to set a new standard for brain atlases, share neuroscientific and clinical data, and encourage the development of “twin brains,” virtual replicas that can be used, for example, in planning epilepsy surgery or implanting electrodes in people with Parkinson's help.
Neuroscientist Katrin Amunts, in an archive image. Mareen Fischinger
“EBRAINS 2.0 connects powerful European resources in the areas of neuroinformatic modeling, mapping and high-resolution brain atlases or supercomputing with research groups focused on the clinic, which has an impact on patients,” emphasizes Amunts. “An important example is the field of personalized medicine for brain diseases, where virtual models of the brain are emerging as a new clinical and research tool.” As the expert explains, the performance that allows us to develop surgical strategies or the stimulation of the cerebral cortex requires to control certain diseases, the integration of individual patient information from magnetic resonance imaging or electroencephalograms with high-resolution data sets and AI methods. “At a global level, EBRAINS 2.0 will make an important contribution to the new era of digital neuroscience and promote European leadership in this field,” he believes.
The original infrastructure was launched in 2019 as part of the HBP. It combines brain data, several digital tools – such as one of the most sophisticated virtual atlases of the organ that regulates our lives – and high-tech computing systems. In 2021, this virtual ecosystem was included in the roadmap of the European Strategic Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI), which aims to coordinate a continental strategy for scientific institutions. In this next phase, “we hope to make it sustainable so that it can continue to be useful to the research community in the future,” admits Amunts.
EBRAINS 2.0 involves 59 associated institutions in 16 European countries, two of them in Spain: the Rey Juan Carlos University and the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM). They form a pan-European network of services provided through 11 national hubs. The Spanish node – “very active” according to Amunts – is coordinated by the UPM and includes some companies and organizations such as the CSIC, the University of Granada or the research institutes of the Hospital Clínic of Barcelona (FRCB-IDIBAPS) or the Sant Joan de Déu (IRSJD ), also in the city of Barcelona.
Scientists are in the process of cutting a human brain.Mareen Fischinger
“It is important for Europe to take advantage of the great scientific excellence of the countries that make it up,” emphasizes the neuroscientist. “Therefore, joint research and technology platforms play a fundamental role. It was a key motivation when we designed EBRAINS,” he adds. “In addition to this political dimension,” he continues, “there is a scientific need to develop integrative approaches to brain research that transcend disciplines and national borders.”
The complexity and dimension of the task also suggest planetary cooperation. The end of HBP funding last year left the continuity of Europe's groundbreaking path in an environment of high international competitiveness hanging in the balance. Countries such as the USA, China, Japan, Australia and South Korea are also developing ambitious projects to deepen our knowledge of the brain.
“The world's most important international research projects strive to ensure compatibility and complementarity of efforts,” emphasizes Amunts, who believes that “collaboration between researchers from the EU and other continents has been facilitated by collaborations within the EU itself.” HBP. “ He praises, for example, the work of the Spanish neuroscientist working with the HBP Javier de Felipe, researcher at the UPM Biomedical Technology Center and leader of the Cajal Blue Brain project, which aims to simulate the functioning of the brain at the molecular level. “It provided a large amount of very detailed cell phone data that is used in Europe and other international projects to develop models and simulations,” recalls Amunts.
“It is also necessary for global initiatives to exchange and coordinate common standards, for example on neuroethics,” emphasizes the expert. To this end, the HBP and many other major brain research projects have founded the International Brain Initiative, whose goal is “to advance neuroscience through international collaboration and knowledge exchange, uniting diverse ambitions and disseminating discoveries for the benefit of humanity.” In a global context of increasing polarization and in a world that looks normal as we enter 2024, perhaps the universal language of science is the ideal for reminding us of our shared humanity.
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