Precision Neurotechnologies for Human Therapeutics

Description

ARIA is an R&D funding agency built to unlock scientific and technological breakthroughs that benefit everyone. We empower scientists and engineers to pursue research at the edge of what is technologically or scientifically possible. We reach across disciplines, sectors and institutions to shape, fund and manage projects across the R&D ecosystem, from startups to universities, to break down silos and discover new pathways. We're looking for proposals for our Precision Neurotechnologies for Human Therapeutics programme, for more information see here https://www.aria.org.uk/precision-neurotechnologies/ Lot 1: Neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders have an enormous social and economic impact - in 2019, brain disorders accounted for 500m years of healthy life lost. Despite advances in brain-computer interfacing technologies, there have been very few serious attempts at engaging with the central nervous system at the circuit level, where disorders ranging from epilepsy to depression occur. We see a critical opportunity to develop next-generation tools that interface with the human brain at the circuit level. Operating across distributed brain regions and with cell type specificity, these new platform technologies could yield breakthroughs in disease understanding and diagnosis, alleviate bottlenecks in existing therapies, and move us closer to a world in which personalised brain health care is available to everyone. Our goal: to unite the frontiers of engineered biology and hardware to treat many of the complex and devastating brain disorders affecting individuals and communities worldwide. For more information see here https://www.aria.org.uk/precision-neurotechnologies/