UK’s Darpa-Style Agency Aims to Rewire the Human Brain

The UK’s Advanced Research and Innovation Agency (ARIA) was launched in 2023 with a mission to chase “high-risk, high-reward” moonshots. Its portfolio spans everything from improving food security to pioneering new methods for boosting human immunity.

Backed by more than £1 billion (roughly $1.3 billion) in government funding through 2030, one of ARIA’s most daring projects is a £69 million initiative focused on developing more precise ways to modulate the human brain. The ultimate goal is to treat a wide spectrum of disorders, including epilepsy and Alzheimer’s disease.

Previous reports indicate that these neurological conditions collectively cost the UK economy tens of billions of dollars annually. According to ARIA program director Jacques Carolan, the common thread is that they are all disorders of brain circuitry.

“Sometimes there are circuits that are overconnected, that are underconnected, there’s different brain regions that are at play, there’s different cell types,” Carolan said during his talk at WIRED Health in London on April 16. “Our current set of interventions just don’t have the precision we need. The vision of the program is, ‘Can we build more precise neurotechnologies to interface at the circuit level?’”

So far, ARIA has taken a broad approach to this moonshot by funding 19 different research teams. Their work ranges from using ultrasound as a novel method to “biotype” a patient’s brain, to innovative forms of deep brain stimulation that could both protect and regenerate specific brain regions.

At WIRED Health, Carolan emphasized the dual potential of ultrasound technologies. They can not only modulate brain activity but also give scientists new insights into a patient’s brain circuitry. One ARIA-funded team at Imperial College London is combining ultrasound with gene therapy to image gene expression in real-time within neurons. This could provide a far more detailed understanding of why certain brain networks malfunction.

Over the past 25 years, implanting electrodes deep in the brain to stimulate the basal ganglia has emerged as a breakthrough treatment for advanced Parkinson’s disease. It offers a new way to manage motor symptoms when medications fail. Looking ahead, Carolan believes similar approaches could be applied to other debilitating neurological conditions, calling this the future of neurotherapeutics.

“What people have discovered is that the same technology can actually be used to treat potentially things like depression, addiction, epilepsy, a whole series of intractable conditions,” he said. “It’s proof that we can have platform technologies that can address a broad range of conditions.”

Given the ambitious nature of ARIA’s goals, questions naturally arise about how to measure success or failure. But as Kathleen Fisher, ARIA’s CEO, pointed out at WIRED Health, these research investments may yield unexpected downstream benefits.

Fisher, who previously worked at Darpa,the US Defense Department agency that inspired ARIA,highlighted the high-impact potential of early government funding. In 2013, Darpa awarded up to $25 million to accelerate the development of vaccine platforms that could be produced at unprecedented speed.

“That company was Moderna,” Fisher recalled. “That technology was mRNA, technology that came online just in time for Covid.” The resulting vaccines went on to save countless lives during the pandemic.

Fisher’s vision is that by the early 2030s, ARIA will have already produced “seedlings of societal impact” in its brain research or another focus area, making it an obvious choice for the UK government to renew the agency’s funding.

“It might be that we’re starting to see trials that show we can do [brain] circuit-level interventions in a way that doesn’t require surgery,” Fisher said. “Will we get all the way in seven years? Probably not, but we could have enough evidence that it’s going to be possible.”