Most de­tailed hu­man brain map yet is ‘lay­ing the foun­da­tion for find­ing fu­ture cures’

Sci­en­tists have pub­lished the most de­tailed cat­a­log yet of the hu­man brain’s bil­lions of cells and how their genes are used, re­veal­ing new clues about what goes wrong in dis­ease and pro­vid­ing new footholds for de­vel­op­ing tar­get­ed ther­a­pies, ac­cord­ing to in­ter­views that End­points News con­duct­ed with more than a dozen peo­ple in­volved in the mas­sive project.

The $250 mil­lion cel­lu­lar parts list is the prod­uct of a five-year ef­fort known as the BRAIN Ini­tia­tive Cell Cen­sus Net­work (BIC­CN) and was large­ly fund­ed by the Na­tion­al In­sti­tutes of Health.

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