An anonymous reader writes: BOSTON / NEW YORK — No, this is not science fiction. A team of scientists from Boston and New York are working on next generation neuroimaging technology. The company, Brain Backups LLC, launched an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign this week which will run until New Year’s Day. Their unprecedented imaging techniques are nondestructive, noninvasive, and ultra high definition. “This technology allows us to get data with a thousand times higher accuracy than any MRI we have today,” says Russell Hanson, founder of Brain Backups LLC. With the ability to see a single neuron in vivo and identify its function, Hanson and his colleagues might be able to catch a glimpse of the circuitry of the brain in action. This would reveal a larger network that scientists are calling the connectome, a map of all neuronal connections in the human mind.
Much like the genome, mapping the connectome would likely spur major advances in personalized medicine, the diagnosis of degenerative diseases, and our understanding of human memory. In theory, a person’s connectome could fit on a hard drive, albeit a large one. Calculations show it could take as little as 500 TB of space with compression. A Brain Backup, therefore, may cost the consumer around $25,000. Not a small spend, but certainly far from the most expensive procedure available in healthcare today.
Professor Hanson and his fellow scientists and synthetic biology engineers are not the first to contemplate connectome mapping. However, traditional methods involve antibody markers and electron microscopes, which require slicing the brain into incredibly thin pieces and imaging them one at a time. What makes Brain Backups different is that they are using aptamers – tiny strands of DNA – that can be injected in the bloodstream and bind to specific sites on the neuron; then safely clear the system after a few hours. “We know we have a long way to go, but if we want science fiction to become reality in our lifetimes, we should start now to build technology meant for use in living beings,” says Jason Fuller, the engineer who designed these markers.
Visit Brain Backups on Indiegogo today to support this amazing research. Who knows, you could be one of the first to have your Brain Backup when the technology first hits the ground!
