Unlocking the brain’s black box
The white dots illustrate the locations of all electrode recording sites used for mapping neural activity linked with natural mood fluctuations in patients awaiting surgery for epilepsy. (Image by Chang Lab, UCSF)
Scientists led by the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) are studying how brain function and dysfunction play out across distributed neural systems rather than being relegated to distinct anatomical regions of the brain.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funded the research to determine whether advanced neurotechnologies can offer more effective and personalized therapies that respond to an individual’s changing brain state to keep neural activity within a healthy range. Part of that work was elucidating what goes on inside the sub-networks of the brain as neuropsychiatric illnesses unfold to help doctors develop new, more effective strategies for intervention.
The researchers developed a decoding technology that can predict changes in mood from recorded neural signals. Next, they identified a specific sub-network of the brain that appears to contribute to depressed mood, especially in people with anxiety. Most recently they were able to alleviate symptoms of moderate to severe depression using open-loop neural stimulation delivered to the orbitofrontal cortex region of the brain to modulate the sub-network that contributes to depression. These results of their work appeared in Nature Biotechnology, Cell, and Current Biology, respectively, from September to November 2018.
The research is part of DARPA’s Systems-Based Neurotechnology for Emerging Therapies (SUBNETS) program to develop responsive, adaptable, closed-loop therapies for neuropsychiatric illness that incorporate recording and analysis of brain activity with near-real-time neural stimulation to correct or mitigate brain dysfunction. By understanding what healthy brain activity looks like across these sub-networks, comparing that to unhealthy brain activity, and identifying predictive biomarkers that indicate changing state, DARPA plans to develop interventions that maintain a healthy brain state within a normal range of emotions.
“There are millions of veterans in the United States who suffer from neuropsychiatric illness, and for many of them, existing treatments do not offer meaningful relief,” said Justin Sanchez, who oversees SUBNETS as director of DARPA’s biological technologies office. “What the researchers we’ve funded have been able to achieve is to begin to identify how mental illness manifests throughout the brain, and how those relevant sub-networks communicate, which starts to reveal when and where to stimulate for optimal effect. These accomplishments pave the way for additional studies that move beyond anxiety and depression, but more importantly, by demonstrating a proof of concept, they have opened the door to commercial transition so that these technologies can ultimately be put to use to improve the lives of veterans.”
