The European Commission has just approved 38 million euros that, over the next three years (until 2026), will support the cutting-edge digital infrastructure to study the brain EBRAINS (European Brain Research Infrastructures), a collaborative research platform designed to advance neuroscience and improve brain health. This is the main legacy of the Human Brain Project (HBP), a colossal challenge also financed by the EU – which contributed two thirds of its 600 million euro budget – concluded last September amid uncertainty about the prospects for neuroscience in Europe. In its decade of development, it achieved pioneering advances in this discipline and medical and technological applications against Parkinson's, schizophrenia or blindness, among other pathologies.
The decision was announced by the coordinators of the initiative, which is now 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 from all over the planet that “allows the development of simulations at the molecular, cellular, neuronal network or entire brain level and to execute analyzes in supercomputers or neuromorphic computing devices.
“Large collaborative projects that share data and digital tools have become a characteristic of this phase of neuroscience, which has been consolidated as a paradigm that we call digital neuroscience,” Amunts, who led the writing, now describes by email. of the successful EBRAINS 2.0 proposal. “Its common characteristic is that it relies heavily on large and complex data, manageable and accessible through powerful large-scale computing resources enabled by EBRAINS 2.0. This is a crucial advance that allows us to connect knowledge obtained on 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, director of the Institute of Neuroscience and Jülich Research Center Medicine.
Personalized brain medicine
The general objective of the project is to collaboratively deepen the knowledge of the structure and function of this organ to offer new advances in brain medicine, technology and computing. EBRAINS 2.0 also aims to set a new standard for brain atlases, share neuroscientific and clinical data and promote the development of “twin brains”, virtual replicas that help, for example, plan epilepsy surgery or implant electrodes in people. with Parkinson's.
“EBRAINS 2.0 connects powerful European resources in neurocomputational modeling, mapping and high-resolution brain atlases or supercomputing with research groups focused on the clinic, which has an impact on patients,” highlights Amunts. “An important example is the area of personalized medicine for brain diseases, where virtual models of the brain are emerging as a new clinical and research tool.” As the expert details, the achievement that allows us to design surgical strategies or guide the stimulation of the cerebral cortex in certain diseases requires integrating individual patient information from magnetic resonance imaging or electroencephalograms with high-resolution data sets and AI methods. “On a global scale, EBRAINS 2.0 will strongly contribute to the new era of digital neuroscience and foster European leadership in this field,” she believes.
The original infrastructure was launched in 2019, under the HBP. It brings together brain data, multiple digital tools – such as one of the most sophisticated virtual atlases of the organ that governs our lives – and high-tech computing facilities. In 2021, this virtual ecosystem was included in the roadmap of the European Strategic Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI), which seeks to coordinate a continental strategy on scientific facilities. In this next phase, “we hope to make it sustainable so that it continues to serve the research community in the future,” Amunts confides.
EBRAINS 2.0 has the participation of 59 associated institutions in 16 European countries, two of them Spanish: the Rey Juan Carlos University and the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM). They form a pan-European network of services provided through 11 national nodes. 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.
“For Europe it is important to make the most of the great scientific excellence of the countries that make it up,” emphasizes the neuroscientist. “Therefore, joint research technological platforms play a fundamental role. It was a central motivation when we conceived EBRAINS,” she adds. “In addition to this political dimension,” she continues, “there is a scientific need to develop integrative approaches to brain research that cross disciplines and national borders.”
The complexity and dimension of the task also recommend planetary collaboration. The end of HBP financing last year left in the air the continuity of a pioneering path undertaken by Europe in a context of high international competitiveness. Countries such as the United States, China, Japan, Australia and South Korea are also developing ambitious projects to deepen our knowledge about the brain.
“The main international research projects in the world strive to guarantee the compatibility and complementarity of efforts,” insists 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 who collaborates with the HBP Javier de Felipe, a researcher at the UPM Biomedical Technology Center and director of the Cajal Blue Brain project, which seeks to simulate the functioning of the bra
in at a molecular level. “He provided a large number of very detailed cellular data that is used in Europe and in other international projects to develop models and simulations,” recalls Amunts.
“It is also necessary for global initiatives to exchange and coordinate common standards on, for example, neuroethics,” emphasizes the specialist. To this end, the HBP and many other major brain research projects have founded the International Brain Initiative, which seeks to “advance neuroscience through international collaboration and knowledge exchange, unite diverse ambitions and disseminate discoveries for the benefit of humanity.” In a global context of growing polarization and in a world that, at the beginning of 2024, looks regular, perhaps the universal language of science is the ideal to remind us of our common humanity.
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