From DARPA:
Four years ago, DARPA announced the start of a “journey of discovery” toward understanding and treating networks of the brain. The Systems-Based Neurotechnology for Emerging Therapies (SUBNETS) program proposed 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. The premise of SUBNETS is that brain function and dysfunction — rather than being relegated to distinct anatomical regions of the brain — play out across distributed neural systems. 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.
This autumn, in three consecutive publications, researchers led by the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) — one of two primary performers on SUBNETS, along with Massachusetts General Hospital — shared breakthroughs. First, they 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 existing anxiety. Finally and most recently, they reported they were able to alleviate symptoms of moderate to severe depression using open-loop neural stimulation delivered to the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) region of the brain to modulate a sub-network that contributes to depression. These cascading results appeared in Nature Biotechnology, Cell, and Current Biology, respectively, from September to November 2018.
Justin Sanchez, the director of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office, oversees the SUBNETS program. Explaining the motivation behind the work, he said, “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. Their experiences with mental illness have essentially been a black box against which doctors try a combination of medication and counseling, but because we have lacked a mechanistic understanding of how these illnesses manifest in the brain, these interventions are limited in their effectiveness and applicability. It is extremely frustrating for patients to not know why they feel the way they do and to not be able to correct it. We owe them and their families better options.”
DARPA’s approach was to establish if 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....MORE
