The UK’s Answer to Darpa Wants to Rewire the Human Brain

The UK’s Advanced Research and Innovation Agency (ARIA) was established in 2023 with the goal of pursuing “high-risk, high-reward” moonshots in sectors ranging from bolstering food security to new ways of ramping up human immunity.

With more than £1 billion (about $1.3 billion) worth of government funding earmarked between now and 2030, one of ARIA’s most ambitious programs is a £69 million initiative that aims to develop more tailored ways of modulating the human brain. The hope is to eventually address an entire range of disorders, from epilepsy to Alzheimer’s.

Reports have previously estimated that this suite of neurological conditions costs the UK economy tens of billions of dollars each year. According to ARIA program director Jacques Carolan, the unifying link is that they are all disorders of brain circuitry.

“Sometimes there are circuits that are overconnected, that are underconnected, there’s different brain regions that are at play, there’s different cell types,” Carolan said, speaking at WIRED Health in London on April 16. “Our current set of interventions just don’t have the precision we need. The vision of the program is, ‘Can we build more precise neurotechnologies to interface at the circuit level?’”

So far, ARIA’s broad-brush approach to this particular moonshot has seen them fund 19 different teams. They’re working on ideas ranging from the use of ultrasound as a novel way to “biotype” a particular patient’s brain, to unique methods of deep brain stimulation that could both protect and regenerate different brain regions.

At WIRED Health, Carolan highlighted the potential of ultrasound technologies not only to modulate the brain, but to allow scientists to obtain new information about the brain’s circuitry in a particular patient. One ARIA-funded team at Imperial College London is working on a project combining ultrasound and gene therapy to try to image gene expression in real-time in neurons, potentially enabling scientists to get a far more detailed picture of why certain brain networks are malfunctioning.

Over the past 25 years, the idea of implanting electrodes deep within the brain and using them to stimulate a particular region, known as the basal ganglia, has emerged as a novel treatment for patients with advanced forms of Parkinson’s disease. It has provided a new avenue for managing motor symptoms when drug treatments no longer work. In future, Carolan claims, similar approaches could be used for a range of other debilitating neurological conditions, a concept which he views as the future of neurotherapeutics.

“What people have discovered is that the same technology can actually be used to treat potentially things like depression, addiction, epilepsy, a whole series of intractable conditions,” he said. “It’s proof that we can have platform technologies that can address a broad range of conditions.”

Given the lofty nature of ARIA’s goals, many have questioned how to evaluate whether its programs ultimately succeed or fail. But as Kathleen Fisher, ARIA’s CEO, pointed out at WIRED Health, there may well be downstream benefits of these research investments which are completely unexpected.

Fisher, who previously worked at Darpa, the US Department of Defense agency on which ARIA has been modeled, noted the high-impact potential of early government investments. 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,” Fisher recalled. “That technology was mRNA, technology that came online just in time for Covid.” The subsequent rollout of these vaccines went on to save countless deaths during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Fisher’s goal is that by the early 2030s, ARIA will have already begun to show “seedlings of societal impact” either in its brain research or another area of focus that make it a no-brainer for the UK government to renew the agency’s funding.

“It might be that we’re starting to see trials that show we can do [brain] circuit-level interventions in a way that doesn’t require surgery,” Fisher said. “Will we get all the way in seven years? Probably not, but we could have enough evidence that it’s going to be possible.”