All scientific disciplines are advancing, but few so fast and with such potential to impact our lives as the field of neuroscience. That’s what Dana Foundation President Caroline Montojo told me last month when we discussed that foundation’s newest funding effort, the Dana Center Initiative for Neuroscience and Society. The program is an ambitious effort to ensure that science develops to the benefit of society by creating new avenues for cross-pollination between white-coated researchers and the broader public.
It’s one of several new directions in neuroscience funding that we’ve seen in recent months as we’ve tracked philanthropy’s evolving interests in this fast-moving field.
The field of neuroscience has historically been limited by the difficulty of studying and mapping how neurons function, particularly the neurons within the brain: After all, it’s hard to poke around in a living person’s brain. But in the last two decades, new techniques to visualize and understand relevant biochemical, molecular and genetic mechanisms are revolutionizing the study of neuroscience.
For example, researchers can now, with increasing accuracy, study the behavior of individual cells and map the connections and changes in groups of cells. This sort of information obviously has implications for the treatment of many neurological conditions and diseases, including hard-to-treat problems like psychiatric disorders and dementia, and probably many currently unforeseen areas. But revealing the key functions of the brain and nervous system will also help scientists understand how the human nervous system is responding to factors outside the realm of disease, like urban noise, technology such as smartphones, or to a changing global climate.
Here are three neuroscience grantmakers we’re following that are currently backing efforts to expand the boundaries of the field, both within the realm of biomedical research and into new, cross-disciplinary territory.
Dana Foundation: Aligning neuroscience with social good
Last month, I wrote about the Dana Foundation’s newly launched Dana Center Initiative for Neuroscience and Society. The $11 million effort has several goals, most broadly to ensure that neuroscience research and science advance in ways that are beneficial to broader society. With neuroscience in a period of accelerating progress thanks to powerful new research tools and technologies, the Dana Foundation created the Neuroscience and Society initiative to keep research moored to the needs and best interests of the world outside the laboratory.
The program signals a significant change in orientation for the longtime research funder. The New York-based foundation has been an important grantmaker for neuroscience and brain research going back to the 1980s. But in recent years, as more funders came on the neuroscience scene, and as the effects of science and technology on people at all levels of society have become more apparent, Dana Foundation leadership reassessed its strategy and role. The new initiative demonstrates its mission to align the interests of those who do science with those whose lives are ultimately affected by that science. The initiative will set up centers based at research universities and will develop new ways to break down the barriers between laboratories and the world beyond the campus, aiming to give wider society a voice in research and development.
In particular, the foundation hopes to engage underrepresented people and communities. It’s hardly news that the biomedical field and other areas of scientific research have lagged behind in the diversity department, and the field of neuroscience is no different. The first grant from the initiative will set up a Dana Center jointly operated by UCLA, Charles R. Drew University (one of only four historically Black medical schools in the country), and Loyola University Chicago.
The UCLA-CDU Dana Center will bring together scholars from the neurosciences, social sciences and humanities to work with local clinician-scholars and community partners and organizations in South Los Angeles who are seeking to reimagine the relationship between neuroscience and the public. It will also support work to generate new ways to develop research collaborations, train the next generation of scholars and inform policy and decision-making in ways that genuinely partner with community members. The foundation says it will announce additional Dana Center Initiative grants in the coming months.
Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group/Allen Institute: Exploring the neuroimmune nexus
The study of neurobiology and health is poised for discovery and expansion into new areas. The late Paul Allen and the philanthropic and research vehicles he launched have been major forces in research and funding of brain and neurobiology science, known for such sweeping projects as the Allen Brain Map, the Allen Brain Cell Atlas, the Seattle Alzheimer’s Disease Brain Cell Atlas.
Late last year, I wrote about a new step for the Allen research operation: the establishment of the Allen Discovery Center for Neuroimmune Interactions, based at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai. It’s the fifth Allen Discovery Center, continuing a research model that the Allen Frontiers Group has been operating for nearly a decade, created to drive progress in emerging ideas in science. The Frontiers Group launched the Neuroimmune Interactions center with $10 million in funding over four years, which will potentially be extended to $20 million over eight years. Sparking the new center were discoveries made during the last decade that show how peripheral neuroimmune interactions help regulate a variety of biological and disease processes, ranging from immunity and inflammation to cancer and metabolism.
The subject’s multidisciplinary nature and its use of the latest biomedical research technologies made it a natural choice for the Allen and Frontiers Group team. “[The subject was] something that caught our eye, both for the fundamental biology that’s going to be uncovered but also for the new technology that’s been created and will need to be created in order for some of these insights to occur,” said Kathryn Richmond, executive vice president and director of the Frontiers Group and the Office of Science and Innovation at the Allen Institute, when we spoke.
Driving this advancing study of the neuroimmune system are novel research tools in fields such as optogenetics, chemogenetics and viral tracing, enabling scientists to better observe and understand the activity of individual cells. Medical science has traditionally considered the nervous system and its sensory functions to be more or less separate from the body’s immune system. But, as Richmond put it, “Research in the last decade has shown that there are some key interactions that we weren’t aware of and that are going to be pivotal both in human health and fundamental biology.”
In fact, new evidence suggests that the nervous system has the capacity to sense information within the body, such as the presence or activity of microbes like bacteria and fungi, in thousands of ways. It’s an exciting new understanding of the sensory nervous system that extends beyond basic functions like sight, touch and taste. Neuroimmunology researchers are asking if this enhanced appreciation of sensory information within the body will help medicine address diseases such as allergies, inflammatory conditions and possibly even cancer.
The Kavli Foundation: Neurobiology and climate change
Since its establishment in 2000 by Norwegian-American scientist and businessman Fred Kavli, the Kavli Foundation has been an important funder of basic science — a crucial arena of science philanthropy, given the frequent lack of public-sector and corporate support, and one populated by big names like the Simons Foundation.
Neuroscience has been one of Kavli’s core areas of focus, along with astrophysics, nanoscience and theoretical physics. About two years ago, Kavli’s leaders grew interested in emerging questions around the impacts of environmental changes upon the neurobiology of organisms, such as sea creatures that live in warming oceans. The foundation’s Neurobiology and Changing Ecosystems initiative, announced in 2023, is supporting the study of how animals’ cells and molecular networks are perturbed by change, such as disease or environmental distress.
The brains and neural systems of animals have throughout the history of life on earth evolved in response to the environment. But Kavli wants to explore how human-driven environmental changes, currently underway at breakneck pace, are affecting the neurobiology of animal species and the ecosystems they inhabit.
Kavli committed $5 million in research funding to launch the ecosystems initiative. Amy Bernard, director of life sciences at Kavli, said the funding levels would likely be extended as this new area of study gains momentum and attracts more researchers.
As I wrote in late 2023 at the time of Kavli’s announcement, the research area is inherently interdisciplinary, requiring an understanding of issues such as pollution, habitat depletion, climate change, ocean shipping and related noise, and other factors that can impact organisms.
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These are just a few of the new directions toward which neuroscience funders are driving interest — and grant dollars. But with a field this fast-moving, we expect other science and health funders will continue to find it worthwhile to increase their grantmaking or develop entirely new programs within the realm of neuroscience.
