On Jan. 21, 2025, Rice University announced that four research groups are part of an inaugural cohort of 18 projects funded by the Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA) ⎯ a United Kingdom government agency inspired by the United States’ Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) ⎯ to unlock cutting-edge brain-interfacing technologies.

Neurological conditions are the leading cause of illness and disability worldwide with more than 1 in 3 people impacted, according to the World Health Organization. The economic burden of neurological disorders in the U.K. is roughly $5.4 billion, and in the U.S. some estimates run as high as $800 billion annually.

To address these challenges, ARIA announced the launch of its Precision Neurotechnologies program, led by program director Jacques Carolan, with $84.2 million over four years in funding for projects that “explore and unlock new methods to interface with the human brain at the circuit level.”

Three of the four awardee labs at Rice are part of a team that has won approximately $5.9 million for the development of Brain Mesh, a distributed network of minimally invasive implants, the size of a grain of rice, to stimulate neural circuits with cell-type precision and stream neural data in real time.

Designed to be embedded in the skull above the dura ⎯ the protective membrane that envelops neural tissue ⎯ the millimeter-sized nodes entail relatively simple, low-risk surgery.