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The Simons Foundation has launched an $80 million, 10-year international collaboration to study how energy availability shapes brain function. ISTA professor Tim Vogels will receive $3 million to build computational models connecting cellular energy metabolism with neuronal activity and learning. The initiative’s hoped-for insights into disorders and aging are research goals, not established outcomes.
The Simons Foundation has launched an $80 million, 10-year international research collaboration to investigate how energy availability shapes brain function, naming Institute of Science and Technology Austria professor Tim Vogels as a participant receiving $3 million. Vogels and his team will develop computational models linking energy use inside brain cells to neural activity, information processing and learning.
The initiative, called the Simons Collaboration on Brain Energetics (SCOBE), brings together 26 investigators from the United States, Austria, Great Britain and Norway. It is led by Thomas Clandinin of Stanford University and combines neuroscience with cellular and molecular biology, engineering and theoretical research. Its stated aim is to study energy and brain function across levels, from individual cells to neural networks and behavior.
Vogels’s group at ISTA is set to contribute to three of the collaboration’s four research areas. It will model how mitochondria, which produce energy within cells, relate to neuronal activity. The models are intended to provide test beds for experiments conducted by other teams. In work with groups at Stanford, the Allen Institute and the University of Oslo, Vogels’s team will also help model larger networks and investigate how energy demands affect learning.
Another research focus is how the brain responds when energy availability changes, including during metabolic stress. The collaboration plans to examine conditions such as diabetes, reduced oxygen levels and pregnancy as circumstances that can affect energy available to the brain. Vogels’s group will use data from collaborators to model links between energy supply and demand, including how neurons and glia respond to short-term changes in energy-related metabolites.
Linking Brain Energy to Learning
The research addresses a basic question about brain function: how does energy supply affect what neural circuits can do? The brain uses energy to support cell activity, communication and adaptation, but the initiative says the processes connecting energy availability with information processing remain incompletely understood. Studying those links could help researchers interpret how brain function changes during periods of high demand, rest or metabolic stress.
The collaboration’s longer-term aims include informing research on developmental brain disorders and aging. Those are potential contributions, not promised medical outcomes. The immediate work is to integrate experimental evidence with computational models and test the models against new findings. If successful, this approach could help researchers ask more precise questions about how energy use and neural activity influence one another.
For readers, the development is a large, coordinated research investment rather than a report of a new treatment or discovery. Its international structure allows teams with different expertise to study the same problem at several biological scales. The project’s value will depend on what its experiments and models establish over the coming years.
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Why Brain Energetics Is Under Study
The source report describes the brain as operating on about 20 watts, roughly the power of a dim light bulb. That figure illustrates the brain’s energy use, but it does not by itself explain how energy is supplied, distributed or matched to changing activity. The collaboration is organized around those unresolved mechanisms and how they relate to neural function.
Vogels has worked on computational neuroscience, including theories of how inhibitory connections in the brain learn. More recently, he proposed that neurons may increase their activity to use surplus energy and protect themselves from harmful by-products associated with slow metabolism. This is a research proposal, not a confirmed general account of how neurons regulate energy. The source says this work helped lead to his invitation to join SCOBE.
Computational work is central to the collaboration because it can connect measurements from different cell types and experiments into testable models. Simons Foundation senior scientific officer Hannah Bayer said theoretical and computational approaches have been less common in past brain-energetics research. The initiative aims to apply modeling to integrate data across its participating research groups.
“It’s a real honor to be part of this ambitious collaboration. By contributing our expertise in computational neuroscience, my ISTA research group and I hope to tackle some of the big unanswered questions about the brain and gain a better understanding of how energy shapes the way it works, learns, and adapts.”
— Professor Tim Vogels, Institute of Science and Technology Austria
Questions the Models Must Test
The initiative has announced its goals and funding, but the source report does not describe results from the collaboration. It remains unknown which models will best explain links between metabolism and neuronal activity, or how well they will predict experimental observations. The work is designed to test those connections, not to assume them.
The report also does not specify a detailed schedule for individual studies, when initial findings may be published, or how the $80 million will be allocated among participating teams. It names Vogels’s $3 million award but does not provide a breakdown of the other funding. Whether the research will lead to practical applications for understanding disorders or aging is also uncertain and cannot be established at the project’s launch.
Experiments Will Test the Models
Vogels’s group is expected to develop models of mitochondrial energy metabolism and neuronal activity for use alongside experiments by other SCOBE researchers. The collaboration will then draw on experimental data to refine models of larger neural networks and examine how energy availability relates to learning. Work on short-term shifts in energy metabolites will also contribute to models of how brain cells respond to changing supply and demand.
The initiative is planned as a 10-year collaboration. Its next meaningful milestones will be the development and testing of models and the release of research findings from participating teams. The source report does not give dates for those publications, so the timing and results remain to be seen.
Key Questions
What is the Simons Collaboration on Brain Energetics?
It is an $80 million, 10-year international research initiative launched by the Simons Foundation to study how energy availability shapes brain function. It includes 26 investigators from four countries and is led by Thomas Clandinin of Stanford University.
What will Tim Vogels’s team do?
The ISTA group will build computational models linking energy metabolism in mitochondria with neuronal activity. It will also contribute to models of larger neural networks and explore how energy demands relate to learning and responses to changing energy availability.
Has the initiative found that energy use causes brain disorders?
No such finding is reported. The collaboration aims to investigate how energy and brain function relate, with developmental disorders among its longer-term areas of interest. Those are research goals, not confirmed conclusions or clinical claims.
When will the research produce results?
The collaboration is planned to run for 10 years, but the source report does not give dates for its first experiments, publications or other milestones. Findings will depend on the research as it proceeds.
Source: news-medical.net
