A new EBRAINS-led neuroscience project has been awarded a 10 million Euro grant by the European Commission, as part of the Horizon Health Europe Calls 2023 initiative.

The proposal, titled Virtual Brain Twin for personalized treatment of Psychiatric Disorders, with the coordinating role of EBRAINS AISBL, will be under the scientific direction of Viktor Jirsa, Director of the Institut de Neurosciences des Systèmes in Marseille, France. The awarded funding covers 4 years of research.

“In the Virtual Brain Twin, we take a highly innovative approach combining the latest digital twin technology with AI tools to explain how drugs act upon the brain from the molecule to cognition” commented Jirsa. “The potential impact on psychiatry and the society at large is immense.”

Mental disorders are an enourmous economic burden

In the EU, about 165 million people are affected each year by mental disorders. By 2030, estimates are placing mental disorders as the number 1 economic cost factor in medicine.

Schizophrenia alone affects about 1% of the world's population. The clinical effectiveness of the antipsychotics on the market remains limited with 30 to 50% of schizophrenic patients showing an insufficient response to treatment.

Several factors, from genetic to psychological and social, may lie behind poor treatment outcomes or side effects. Drug effectiveness varies significantly from patient to patient.

A new digital ecosystem to guide clinicians

This project will create an ecosystem for generating Virtual Brain Twins for psychiatric patients, spanning across multiple EU countries and building on the expertise in neuronal microcircuit simulation, mathematical analysis, innovative AI tools, psychiatric care and clinical studies obtained during the Human Brain Project.

This ecosystem will guide clinicians to optimise medication type and dosage, and to evaluate alternative treatments, such as brain stimulation and lifestyle changes. Multiscale cause-effect simulations and virtual brain simulations based on fMRI or sMRI data from the individual patient will bridge the gap between molecules and the patient's brain.

The Virtual Brain Twin platform will be at the core of the ecosystem, using big data, multiscale modelling, and high-performance computing (HPC) with strong data safety shields.

The platform will be embedded in the European digital neuroscience research infrastructure EBRAINS and will be initially accessible to neuroscientists, clinical researchers, and mathematical modellers, and in the future, to clinicians, and patients as well.

This ground-breaking project will pave the way for personalised treatment of psychiatric disorders, with the potential to significantly improve the quality of life of patients suffering from these conditions.

The Virtual Brain: Facility Hub went online under hub.thevirtualbrain.org and serves as the first official EBRAINS contact point for any TVB related questions.

This complements the EBRAINS hub network, providing access to state-of-the-art facilities and resources of HBP partners, fostering collaboration to carry out cutting-edge scientific research.

Announced in June 2021, The Virtual Brain: Facility Hub is a contribution of Aix-Marseille University to Europe’s new digital research infrastructure EBRAINS. It complements the current range of EBRAINS services. Aix-Marseille University is partner of the Human Brain Project (HBP).

The Virtual Brain: Facility Hub offers training and help in TVB project development, organizes workshops and provides a concise map to the multitude of sites and TVB services in the EBRAINS ecosystem:

• Education:
  learning how to do full-scale brain modeling with TVB

• Application:
  using TVB on various platforms and contributing to its source code

• Brain data:
  access to data sets usable in the TVB software

The EBRAINS Facility Hub network is aligned with the FENIX supercomputing network to provide user access to computing resources, e.g. for data storage, analysis, and simulation.

Get access to the state-of-the-art facilities and resources of HBP partner institutions, to foster collaboration and carry out cutting-edge scientific research.

HBP and HBP partners provide access to three types of Facility Hubs:

• Physical facilities (e.g. microscopes)
• Competence centres providing specialized software support going beyond the EBRAINS High Level Support Team
• The European Institute for Theoretical Neuroscience (EITN)

Facility Hubs are aligned with the FENIX supercomputing network to provide user access to computing resources, e.g. for data storage, analysis, and simulation.

The first Facility Hub pilots will be operational by the end of March 2021. Additional Hubs are planned to follow.

The Facility Hubs are contributions from HBP partners to the new EBRAINS research infrastructure, and complement the EBRAINS services currently on offer.

From the EBRAINS website, find out more here.

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Founding on EOSC project Virtual Brain Cloud Charite now leads EBRAINS’ Health Data Cloud –- a GDPR-compliant, federated research data ecosystem that enables neuroscience research consortia across Europe and beyond to work with sensitive neuroscience data originating from human subjects, as well as defined routes for sharing of the data and results.

Enabling the integration of distributed health data sources and empowering scientists to model and simulate complex phenomena on interdisciplinary digital twins – while protecting the privacy of the data subjects and patients – will spawn a multiplicity of innovations that may spark breakthroughs towards solving grand challenges of our times such as dementia.

Read the HBP press release here

Read the English Charité blog post here

Lesen Sie den deutschen Blogbeitrag der Charité hier

The Virtual Brain Facility Hub at Aix-Marseille University will provide expert support for activities linked to the use of The Virtual Brain. The Hub aims to increase the capacity of neuroscientists to use ICT tools, such as TVB and EBRAINS, in order to advance scientific knowledge and facilitate the translation of research into clinical applications. To find out more, Click Here

The Facility Hubs are contributions from HBP partners to the new EBRAINS research infrastructure, and complement the EBRAINS services currently on offer. The FENIX supercomputing network - which delivers the computational power behind EBRAINS - will support the Facility Hubs by providing access to computing resources for data storage, analysis, and simulation, through its six centres; BSC in Spain, CEA in France, CSC in Finland, CINECA in Italy, CSCS in Switzerland, and JSC in Germany.