Today, the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) announced that “Neuronal Circuits in Health and Disease”, a consortium directed by Tibor Harkany at the Medical University of Vienna, and co-coordinated IMBA Group Leader Noelia Urbán, is one of the two new Clusters of Excellence funded through the Excellent=Austria initiative. The 21-million-euro funding provided by the Ministery of Education, Science and Research through the FWF will support a collaborative effort by over thirty research teams in Austria to study the development and function of inhibitory neurons in the brain and uncover their role in neuronal diseases such as schizophrenia, autism and epilepsy.  

The coordinating team includes Francesco Ferraguti and Thomas Klausberger at the Medical University of Innsbruck, Gaia Novarino and Peter Jonas at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, Tibor Harkany at the Medical University of Vienna, Noelia Urbán at IMBA, and Manuel Zimmer at the University of Vienna. IMBA scientists Elly Tanaka, Jürgen Knoblich and Sofia Grade are also part of the multidisciplinary project.

“We are extremely happy that, thanks to the cluster, we will be able to capitalize on the strong neuroscience community in Austria to foster interactions and generate synergies among them. We look forward to educating and transferring our knowledge to the next generation of scientists in the country and beyond,” says Noelia Urbán. 

The brain is the most complex and sophisticated organ of the human body. Therefore, understanding brain function is not only the most difficult scientific challenge for humans, but also follows the quest to rationalize consciousness, the “human self”, maximize performance and provide templates for all those disciplines that use the human brain as a model. The new Cluster of Excellence aims to create a comprehensive understanding of how different types of inhibitory neurons - essential cellular nodes of any neural network - develop and interact to control circuit operations that underlie behavior, and how they are susceptible to diseases such as schizophrenia, autism and epilepsy. The results of this research could pave the way for the development of personalized drug therapies to alleviate mental illness. 

About the FWF Excellent=Austria Initiative  

The Excellent=Austria Initiative supports teams of researchers at different Austrian research institutions on their journeys to new discoveries in promising research fields. The two new Clusters of Excellence will bring the total of such projects – which support hundreds of researchers conducting cooperative projects on an unprecedented scale at numerous locations throughout Austria – to nine.  

The funding provided by the Ministery of Education, Science and Research through the FWF recognizes and supports clusters of excellence formed by the successful combination of cutting-edge research, research-led training and the promotion of young talent as well as the national and international exchange of knowledge. Knowledge and technology transfer with industry and society is also a central element. 

The Austrian Science Fund (FWF) provides 60% of the funding volume for the individual clusters, and the remaining 40% comes from the participating research institutions’ own budgets.