In a first-of-its-kind initiative, neuroscientists from around the world came together last month to decide the future of Europe’s neuroscience research. The team at EBRAINS—Europe’s flagship neuroscience infrastructure that was launched in 2019 and comprises tools and data resources for basic neuroscience research—hosted a symposium to map out the infrastructure’s next decade.
Before the meeting, EBRAINS’s leaders invited the global neuroscience community to submit proposals for the projects that the infrastructure should prioritize. During two days of debate, the EBRAINS team considered 139 proposals organized into five strategic themes. Discussions touched on how to make the infrastructure financially sustainable, how to better integrate its broad toolkits, and how to maximize its benefit to society. The crowdsourced approach was “something that has never been attempted before” within neuroscience, said Viktor Jirsa, EBRAINS’s chief scientific officer. EBRAINS’s decentralized approach contrasts with the top-down model of its predecessor, the Human Brain Project (HBP). The 10-year HBP launched in 2013 with the goal of simulating a complete human brain, but it did not deliver on that promise despite its €600 million budget.
EBRAINS, unlike the HBP, hasn’t set a single, overarching goal. Until now, the project has prioritized making resources available for the wider neuroscience community. These efforts make neuroscience easier to do, but the benefits are less obvious to funders, said Jirsa.
The symposium is an opportunity to appeal to funders by showcasing the translational science that EBRAINS can power, he added. But EBRAINS users and data scientists said that the platform should prioritize open science principles and usability upgrades to maximize the infrastructure’s benefit to neuroscientists.
EBRAINS: From HBP Resource to Ambitious Research Platform
EBRAINS began as a resource for accessing HBP-generated data. The latest phase of the infrastructure, which began after the HBP ended in 2023, was designed to consolidate and future-proof the project, said EBRAINS co-chief executive officer Katrin Amunts, the former HBP’s scientific research director. “Every infrastructure needs to be a living infrastructure,” she said.
EBRAINS’s budget is far smaller than the HBP’s. Amunts said that in June, the EBRAINS project leaders will apply for €32 million from the European Commission. While the HBP received funding for a decade, the European Commission is currently only offering calls for funding until 2029, said Jirsa.
“It is clear that this cannot cover everything,” said Amunts. The project will also seek funding from national pots across Europe and from global funding schemes. Amunts mentioned potential collaborations with similar programs in the US, Japan, and China.
Even with its smaller budget, EBRAINS is still ambitious. It is structured into eight “work packages,” covering everything from brain atlases to multi-scale medical datasets, digital twins, a metadata framework called openMINDS, high-performance and neuromorphic computing, community building, platform management, and administration. The goal of these work packages is to get data and toolkits into the hands of neuroscientists around the world.
A Home for Tools to Interrogate the Brain
EBRAINS’s web portal gives users access to a glut of datasets, including atlases of the human, macaque, marmoset, mouse, and rat brains. Neuroscientists can interrogate these atlases and analyze them using the platform’s built-in tool suites.
This integration of atlas and analysis has been a significant boon for Ingvilde Bjerke, a postdoctoral scholar in neuroscience and experimental therapeutics at Pennsylvania State University. Bjerke transforms adult brain atlases to match developmental profiles. “When I make atlases, I can integrate them in the tools that EBRAINS makes, so they're easier for both me and other people to use in analysis,” she said.
The platform currently lists more than 280 toolkits and software packages for analysis, some of which are fully integrated into the infrastructure’s datasets with others contributed by the community. One of these tools is Neurosift, a browser-based tool that visualizes files from the Neurodata Without Borders (NWB) data standard. This is a unified data format designed to make it easier for neurophysiologists to share their data with other scientists.
The EBRAINS team’s decision to integrate tools and datasets from outside of Europe is one of the infrastructure’s major strengths, said Kris Bouchard, a computational biologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who sits on NWB’s executive board. It’s also part of a wider trend, he added. “The globalization of data standards has been a slow tide that is now starting to crest.”
But EBRAINS needs a user interface that can integrate data across types and standards, said Simon McMullan, an integrative neuroscientist at Macquarie University. “The real promise of it, I think, is the data-sharing element of it and making that work really smoothly. I don't think it's there yet,” he said.
McMullan co-created DeepSlice, an AI-based tool in the EBRAINS library that automates registration of histology data into reference atlases. In his research, he uses many of the other tools EBRAINS provides, but he said he accesses them through the NIH-funded Neuroimaging Tools and Resources Collaboratory portal. McMullan said he sees EBRAINS’s long-term goal as creating a “one-stop shop” for finding and analyzing neuroscience data.
Alper Yegenoglu, a researcher in neuro-inspired robotics at Paderborn University, began using the EBRAINS infrastructure in 2024 and contributes to the platform’s education program. Yegenoglu agreed that the platform’s focus should be on improving integration between its disparate toolkits. He said that the platform’s simulation tools cover everything from biochemical approaches to full-brain simulations, but jumping between these layers currently requires significant effort on the user’s part.
Securing a Funding Future for European Neuroscience
In addition to proposals increasing EBRAINS’s functionality, many researchers also floated ideas for how to make sure research funders appreciated the platform’s value. For instance, Bjerke said that EBRAINS would benefit from better metrics to track the impact of uploaded data. A tracker showing how often EBRAINS users accessed and downloaded datasets would give data sharers an easy way to demonstrate how their efforts helped other scientists, she said.
The symposium addressed both infrastructure issues and translational projects that might appeal to funders, said Jirsa. The attendees were roughly split, however, over whether EBRAINS should prioritize clinical and translational impact over advancing fundamental brain science. Jirsa said he sees the two as being inextricably linked. “To be able to generate clinical translation, you must have understanding.”
Some proposals addressed financial stability directly. One called for EBRAINS to create a pricing structure for industrial and clinical bodies that utilize the infrastructure data and tools. “Pricing of services is clearly something that we must consider,” said Jirsa.
EBRAINS will now recruit a writing group to turn two days of debate into a concise roadmap. The community remains divided on some aspects of what EBRAINS’s future should look like. Should the infrastructure prioritize accessible, shareable resources for the European brain science community or pivot to a focus on industrial and clinical translation?
Jirsa sees a way forward that integrates both views. “In the debate, some people said, ‘Do we need a cathedral—something very focused that gets huge visibility with huge impact—or do we need a bazaar, where we do support many different little things?’ The answer was, let's call it an agora. It has to be both,” he concluded.
