BRAINnet: A STANDARDIZED GLOBAL HUMAN BRAIN PROJECT

The BRAINnet Foundation goal is to understand mental illness as a human brain disease and to ultimately discover how to prevent and cure these illnesses; this is accomplished through open electronic sharing and continued expansion of a global database of human brain data in health and disease across the life span. It is a 501(c) 3 US-Based Tax Exempt Research Foundation, with these unique features: (i) standardized protocols and assessment platforms so that data can be pooled across disorders, sites, and studies and (ii) multiple types of data spanning clinical, behavioral, physiological, imaging, and genomic domains in the same subjects. These domains align with those of NIMH's Research Domain Criteria (RDoC), (iii) open sharing of data without needing to contribute new data, and (iv) network of collaborating researchers, for seeking grant support to carry out studies, drawing on existing data and standardized methods. The BRAINnet methods span self-report scales, computerized behavioral measures of cognition and emotion, physiology (EEG, ERP, and concurrent autonomic recordings), magnetic resonance imaging (structural, functional, and diffusion tensor imaging), and salivary or blood draws for genotyping. Currently, data are available for 5,092 healthy subjects and others from specific disorders. Recent outcomes from the published studies using BRAINnet data demonstrate how the standardized approach is a quality and efficient way to take a lead in initiatives being forged in psychiatry and neuroscience, such as NIMH's RDoC, to identify biomarkers that will make a difference in understanding the cause of mental illness, tailoring current treatments, and developing novel ones.