Project Aims To Develop Implant Chip To Treat Psychiatric Disorders.

In continuing coverage, the Washington Times (5/28, Chumley) reports that “Boston researchers are set to launch a five-year, $30 million brain implant project based on President Obama’s ‘BRAIN’ initiative – an ambitious Department of Defense project that is aimed at helping combat veterans deal with the mental injuries and stresses of battlefield deployments.” According to the Times, the Boston Globe reported that “the implant research will take technology already being used to help treat Parkinson’s disease patients and advance it to the point where implanted sensors will be able to detect and react to abnormal brain activity.” Meanwhile, “a second team of researchers with the University of California-San Francisco is poised to receive a separate federal grant of $26 million to conduct similar studies.”

The San Francisco Chronicle (5/27, Allday) reported that that the UCSF team will include “scientists from UC Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Cornell and New York universities.” The group led by UCSF “is charged with developing a neuro-prosthetic device that would allow scientists for the first time to record electrical activity from multiple parts of the brain simultaneously and at a very fine resolution.” Right now, “technology doesn’t exist to record that much information, or to process it in a way that is meaningful to scientists.”

The CBS News (5/28, Blaszczak-Boxe) website reports that it is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that is behind the “plans for a cutting-edge technology-based research program to develop a tiny, implanted chip in the skull to treat psychiatric disorders such as anxiety, PTSD and major depression,” with the aim of finding “new, more effective treatment options for veterans and service members with such debilitating conditions.” This project, named the “Systems-Based Neurotechnology for Emerging Therapies (SUBNETS), will study what exactly goes wrong with brain networks in people with certain psychiatric disorders.”

Also covering the story are NPR (5/27, Hamilton) in its “Shots” blog and on its “Morning Edition” program, the Huffington Post(5/27, Mosbergen), and the San Jose (CA) Business Journal (5/27, Leuty, Subscription Publication).