The National Institutes of Health will provide approximately $20 million in funds to support research of the peripheral nervous system as part of the agency’s Stimulating Peripheral Activity to Relieve Conditions program.NIH said Thursday it aims to help find new treatments for asthma, diabetes and nausea with additional goals to grow knowledge and address technology challenges.
Goals of the biological projects include the creation of anatomical and functional nervous system maps, while technology developments will help make or update measurement and manipulation tools for nerve-organ interactions and function isolations.
SPARC also awarded private sector and academic collaborative research grants in search of new therapeutic strategies for nervous system ailments.
James Anderson, an NIH division director, said the program sponsors multidisciplinary collaborations in an effort to push forward peripheral nervous system research and treatments.
“The SPARC program invests in high-risk, goal-driven projects to discover the underlying mechanisms and pathways by which the peripheral nervous system controls internal organ function,†said Gene Civillico, SPARC program manager.
“These awards have the potential to catalyze next-generation neuromodulation therapies that could bring improved specificity for patients over both drug therapies and previous-generation devices.â€
NIH Common Fund will finance SPARC, which seeks to discover peripheral nerve functions to help identify new treatments for common conditions and diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and heart failure.
The program works to understand how peripheral nerve therapies affect a target organ’s cells to support the efficiency of treatments for an individual and the population at-large.
