December 31, 2017 | December 2017 issue
December 31, 2017 | Representatives from some of the world’s leading brain research projects convened in Canberra, Australia earlier this month to discuss how they can work together and leverage their collective resources. Following that meeting on December 11, the Canberra Declaration was born.
The initial members include the Australian Brain Alliance, Japan’s Brain/MINDS Project, the Korea Brain Initiative, the European Union’s Human Brain Project, and the U.S. Brain Initiative. The declaration summarized the need for this collaboration. “Researchers working on brain initiatives from around the world recognize that they are engaged in an effort so large and complex that even with the unprecedented efforts and resources from public and private enterprise, no single initiative will be able to tackle the challenge to better understand the brain.” The U.S. National Science Foundation issued a statement of support a week later.
An international effort lasting more than a year preceded the announcement. In the spring of 2016, more than 60 scientists identified the challenges of brain and neurosciences internationally at the Global Brain Workshop 2016 hosted by Johns Hopkins University. This wasn’t the only encouragement for the creation of an international alliance. The NSF had a congressional mandate to convene global brain projects. A follow-up meeting was held in September 2016 by Columbia University and Rockefeller University gathering policymakers, scientists, and funding organizations to further this cooperative effort. The summary from that meeting was later published in the journal Cell with the title “Toward a Global BRAIN Initiative.” Concurrently, there was a UN General Assembly meeting recognizing brain science as a foreign policy priority.
In the article in Cell, the authors identified the aforementioned established global brain initiatives but also those emerging in countries such as China, Russia, Israel, Iran, and Canada. Key areas for collaborative projects were outlined laying the foundation for the Canberra Declaration. The vision is to create international collaborative projects in areas of training, funding, ethics, data portals, and technology as well as calling for an annual assembly of stakeholder countries. During the Dome Workshop hosted by the Australian Academy of Science, the non-binding declaration was signed with an initial meeting of the International Brain Initiative to be held in South Korea during the first half of 2018.
What does all of this mean for the neurotechnology industry? Planning leading up to the Declaration specifically identified neurotechnology as a key component as an area of growth and collaboration. The initial published summary made the “strongest case for international collaboration” in the area of neurotechnology centers and the creation of large-scale neuroscience facilities much like other scientific fields of biology, physics, and space stations. Seeking to maximize capital while minimizing costs, these centers of excellence will pool together expertise to form microscopy platforms, nanofabrication tools, and optical imaging facilities.
These collective resources cannot only move science forward but spin these technologies into a vibrant global neurotech industry much like what occurred in the space industry beginning in the 1960s.
