The UK’s Advanced Research and Innovation Agency (ARIA) was established in 2023 with the goal of pursuing “high-risk, high-reward” moonshots in sectors ranging from bolstering food security to new ways of ramping up human immunity. With more than £1 billion (about $1.3 billion) worth of government funding earmarked between now and 2030, one of ARIA’s most ambitious programs is a £69 million initiative that aims to develop more tailored ways of modulating the human brain. The hope is to eventually address an entire range of disorders, from epilepsy to Alzheimer’s. Reports have previously estimated that this suite of neurological conditions costs the UK economy tens of billions of dollars each year. According to ARIA program director Jacques Carolan, the unifying link 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, speaking 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’s broad-brush approach to this particular moonshot has seen them fund 19 different teams. They’re working on ideas ranging from the use of ultrasound as a novel way to “biotype” a particular patient’s brain, to unique methods of deep brain stimulation that could both protect and regenerate different brain regions. At WIRED Health, Carolan highlighted the potential of ultrasound technologies not only to modulate the brain, but to allow scientists to obtain new information about the brain’s circuitry in a particular patient. One ARIA-funded team at Imperial College London is working on a project combining ultrasound and gene therapy to try to image gene expression in real-time in neurons, potentially enabling scientists to get a far more d