Advanced in the UK The Research and Innovation Agency (ARIA) was established in 2023 to pursue “high-risk, high-reward” goals in sectors ranging from increasing food security to modern ways of strengthening human resilience.
With over £1 billion (around $1.3 billion) of government funding committed to 2030, one of ARIA’s most ambitious programs is A £69 million initiative which aims to develop more tailored ways to modulate the human brain. We hope to eventually address a whole range of disorders, from epilepsy to Alzheimer’s disease.
Previous reports have estimated that this set of neurological conditions is costing the UK economy tens of billions of dollars every year. According to ARIA program director Jacques Carolan, the connecting link is that all of these diseases are disorders of brain circuits.
“Sometimes there are circuits that are over-connected or under-connected, there are different areas of the brain involved, there are different types of cells,” Carolan said during a talk at WIRED Health in London on April 16. “Our current set of interventions simply doesn’t provide the precision we need. The vision for the program is: ‘Can we build more precise neurotechnologies that work together at the circuit level?’
So far, ARIA’s broad-based approach to this particular lunar image has led to funding for 19 different teams. They are working on ideas ranging from using ultrasound as a novel way to “biotyping” a specific patient’s brain, to unique deep brain stimulation methods that could both protect and regenerate different areas of the brain.
At WIRED Health, Carolan highlighted the potential of ultrasound technologies to not only modulate the brain, but also allow scientists to gain modern insights into a specific patient’s brain circuitry. One of the ARIA-funded teams at Imperial College London is work on the project combining ultrasound and gene therapy to try to image real-time gene expression in neurons, potentially allowing scientists to get a much more detailed picture of why certain brain networks are malfunctioning.
Over the last 25 yearsthe idea of implanting electrodes deep in the brain and using them to stimulate a specific area called the basal ganglia has emerged as a new way to treat patients with advanced forms of Parkinson’s disease. It has provided a new avenue for treating motor symptoms when drug treatments no longer work. Carolan says that in the future, a similar approach could be used to treat a range of other devastating neurological conditions. This is a concept that he considers the future of neurotherapeutics.
Given the lofty nature of ARIA’s goals, many people have wondered how to judge whether its programs will ultimately succeed or fail. However, as Kathleen Fisher, CEO of ARIA, pointed out at the WIRED Health conference, research investments may have further benefits that are completely unexpected.
Fisher, who previously worked at Darpa, the U.S. Department of Defense agency on which ARIA was modeled, saw the high impact potential of early government investments. In 2013, Darpa awarded a grant of up to $25 million to facilitate the development of vaccine platforms that could be developed at unprecedented speed.
“The company was Moderna,” Fisher recalled. “That technology was mRNA, a technology that came online just in time for Covid.” The subsequent introduction of these vaccines has saved countless deaths during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Fisher’s goal is that by the early 2030s, ARIA will already be demonstrating “seeds of social impact” in its brain research or other area of interest, making it a no-brainer for the UK government to renew funding for the agency.
“Maybe we’re starting to see trials that show we can do it [brain] interventions at the circuit level in a way that doesn’t require surgery,” Fisher said. “Can we get to the end in seven years? Probably not, but we could have enough evidence that it would be possible.”