Australia forges partnership with the US for brain research

Australian and American researchers are set to carry out one of the world’s most ambitious research efforts to understand the human brain.

The National Health and Medical Research Council, or NHMRC, has announced a joint funding round with the US National Institutes of Health, or NIH, to find more effective treatments and methods of prevention for brain conditions such as dementia, autism, epilepsy, depression and Parkinson’s disease.

Under the partnership, NHMRC will fund the Australian researchers who will participate in the study. The project falls under the US Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies, or BRAIN Initiative, which was launched by President Barrack Obama in 2014.

The BRAIN Initiative serves as a large-scale effort to equip researchers with fundamental insights necessary for treating a wide variety of brain disorders. According to NIH, the human brain remains one of the greatest mysteries in science and one of the greatest challenges in medicine. Despite the many advances in neuroscience in recent years, the underlying causes of neurological and psychiatric disorders remain largely unknown.

As a result, these conditions cause a tremendous toll on individuals, families and society. The World Health Organization estimates that brain diseases affect more than one billion people worldwide. In Australia, one in five or 20 percent of adults experience some form of mental illness in any year, according to the National Survey of Mental Health and Wellbeing in 2007. Based on these prevalence rates, over 3.2 million Australians had a mental disorder in the previous 12 months.

With the BRAIN Initiative, researchers are targeting to develop a more complete arsenal of tools and a deeper understanding how the brain functions. This will ultimately catalyze new treatments and cures for devastating brain disorders and diseases, according to NIH.

Professor Anne Kelso, chief executive officer of NHMRC, said there was great potential underlying the agreement. “Both the NIH and NHMRC believe that the ambitious goals of the BRAIN Initiative can best be attained by collaborating across both disciplinary and geographic boundaries. I am very pleased that NHMRC is able to help foster Australia’s contribution to this exciting project and I look forward to the results of this new partnership,” he said.

According to Kelso, Australia and the US have a long history of successful collaboration in research, spanning over the past four decades. Australian researchers have collaborated more with researchers in the US than in any other country, he said.

In July 2015, the US National Institute of Mental Health announced a partnership with Australia’s Orygen for a study on treatment strategies for young people at risk of developing a serious mental illness. It is the first large-scale investigation to blend basic biological and clinical research in one study for young people. The study aims to establish better ways to identify those who are at risk of developing any serious mental illness and how best to treat them before their illness becomes established.

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