UK Agency ARIA Funds £69 Million Brain Modulation Program Targeting Epilepsy and Alzheimer's

The UK's Advanced Research and Innovation Agency (ARIA) has launched a £69 million initiative aimed at developing more tailored ways of modulating the human brain to address disorders from epilepsy to Alzheimer’s, Wired reported. An ARIA program director, speaking at WIRED Health in London on April 16, described the challenges in current treatments.

The program director added, “Our current set of interventions just don’t have the precision we need. The agency has funded 19 different teams for the brain modulation program. These teams are working on ideas ranging from the use of ultrasound to biotype a particular patient’s brain to unique methods of deep brain stimulation that could protect and regenerate different brain regions.

One ARIA-funded team at Imperial College London is combining ultrasound and gene therapy to image gene expression in real-time in neurons. Over the past 25 years, the idea of implanting electrodes deep within the brain to stimulate the basal ganglia has emerged as a treatment for patients with advanced forms of Parkinson’s disease.

This deep brain stimulation provides a new avenue for managing motor symptoms when drug treatments no longer work.

ARIA’s CEO also spoke at WIRED Health. The CEO, who previously worked at Darpa, highlighted past successes in high-risk research. In 2013, Darpa awarded a grant for up to $25 million to facilitate the development of vaccine platforms that could be developed with unprecedented speed.

“That company was Moderna.” ARIA has been modeled on Darpa, the US Department of Defense agency. The CEO’s goal is that by the early 2030s, ARIA will have begun to show seedlings of societal impact in its brain research or another area of focus.