IBME researchers part of teams receiving ARIA Precision Neurotechnologies grants

In the Precision Neurotechnologies programme, Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA) R&D Creators will leverage advances in brain-computer interfaces, AI, computational power, and gene therapies to achieve more precise and effective treatments for brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s and epilepsy.

The programme is funding 18 teams with expertise across multiple disciplines, spanning academia, non-profit R&D organisations, and startups. This portfolio of teams will address four workstreams: non-invasive interfaces, remote interfaces, biological interfaces, and future adoption of novel neurotechnologies. Institute of Biomedical Engineering researchers are part of the teams leading projects in two of these workstreams.

Professor of Clinical Neuroscience Ben Seymour, who works jointly at the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging and the Oxford Institute of Biomedical Engineering, will lead one of the five teams in the Future Adoption workstream. These teams will explore how neurotechnologies can be designed inclusively, recognising the importance of engaging clinicians and people with lived experiences of brain disorders for greater, more equitable adoption of future tech

Professor Seymour’s Quantifying preferences for interventional neurotechnologies team aims to robustly estimate the potential for impact of hypothetical new neurotechnologies. Conventional methods are often hindered by the difficulty in predicting how much individuals and groups will value a hypothetical treatment scenario, so judgments are often biased by unimportant factors. This team is developing a new tool, with patient partners, based on designing a hypothetical health market in which people think in depth about how they would trade-off health outcomes against other commodities, leading to a much better predictor of future adoption.

In the Biological Interfaces workstream, teams will pioneer the use of engineered cells as 'living' interfaces to repair damaged neural pathways and develop innovative approaches for long-term, circuit-level brain interfacing. Professor Dame Molly Stevens, John Black Professor of Bionanoscience at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Department of Physiology, Anatomy & Genetics, will be part of two teams in the Biological Interfaces workstream:

The RESCUE: Regenerative Electroactive Scaffold for Circuit Unification via Electromodulation team, led by Professor Rylie Green (Imperial College London), will develop a new class of biohybrid neurotechnology that will harness the synergy between biology and hardware to enable the engineering of neural circuits in vivo via neuromodulation. This platform will be based on the minimally-invasive delivery of tissue-engineered constructs to deep brain regions, which can be selectively modulated in situ via exogenous stimuli. The team’s vision is that this biohybrid approach will enable the promotion of neuroregeneration, neuroprotection, and neuroplasticity with high cell-type specificity.

The Rebuilding the nigrostriatal pathway team led by Professor George Malliaras (University of Cambridge) will unite expertise in tissue engineering, neurotechnology, computational neuroscience, clinical translation, and stem cells and organoids to test the ability of organoids to repair brain circuits. They will combine in vivo electrical and biochemical simulation approaches to rebuild the nigrostriatal pathway in rat models of Parkinson’s disease. This will allow the development of precision neurotechnologies that have the capacity to restore pathological disease network states back to normal.

Professor Tim Denison, RAE Chair in Emerging Technologies at the Department of Engineering Science and Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, is part of the Precision 4D Control of Cortical Circuit Function team led by Professor Andrew Jackson (Newcastle University). This team aims to deliver data-driven, multi-modal machine learning to define behaviourally-relevant subpopulations within cortical circuits with spatial precision and cell-type specificity. They’ll also deliver custom 4D (multipolar, time- and space-variant) stimulation technology to selectively target these subpopulations with spatial precision and cell-type specificity for closed-loop control of pathological network dynamics and brain states underlying awake behaviour.

About the programme:

ARIA is an R&D funding agency created to unlock technological breakthroughs that benefit everyone. Sponsored by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, they fund teams of scientists and engineers to pursue research at the edge of what is scientifically and technologically possible. Led by Programme Director Jacques Carolan, and backed by £69 million over four years, ARIA are funding 18 teams with expertise across a myriad of disciplines and a strong institutional mix, spanning academia, non-profit R&D organisations, and startups. Together, they'll unlock new ways to interface with the brain at the circuit level, understand the human challenges to adoption, and design future technologies for greater inclusivity and equity.