STAT+: Ambitious NIH drive to solve brain mysteries faces uncertain future
Budgeted spending for NIH BRAIN Initiative has plunged by more than half, from $680 million in 2023 to $320 million this year
In 2021, scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, decoded brain signals from a man who hadn’t spoken in more than 15 years to generate words that flashed on a screen.
This March, Medtronic, a medical device company, won regulatory approval for a first-of-its-kind therapy that delivers precise, adjustable pulses of electricity to the brains of people with Parkinson’s disease.
These and other advances have been fueled by a multibillion-dollar bid by the National Institutes of Health to better understand the human brain. But that dozen-year effort now faces an uncertain future after consecutive years of big funding cuts.
The program, known as Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies, or the BRAIN Initiative, has been likened to a Human Genome Project for the brain, with the goal of unravelling the mysteries of the body’s most important and complex organ. That work must now proceed with reduced support after Congress passed a 2025 budget that set aside about $320 million for the initiative, a 20% decrease compared to 2024 levels — which were in turn 40% less than the $680 million budgeted in 2023.
