image: Detailed image of the reconstructed neocortical circuit with a selection of neurons highlighted in different colors according to their morphological types.
Credit: Copyright © 2015-2024 Blue Brain Project/EPFL
LAUSANNE, March 18, 2025 – The Open Brain Institute (OBI) launches today as a groundbreaking non-profit organization, transforming neuroscience from the physical to the virtual world. Building on the pioneering achievements of the EPFL’s Blue Brain Project, OBI opens the era of simulation neuroscience—empowering researchers to build and simulate digital brains with unprecedented detail, scale, and speed.
AI has been given access to the software recipe to build digital brains, providing natural language support to researchers to explore, build and simulate digital brains, petabytes of brain data collected from global databases, and the world’s cumulative knowledge of the brain and its diseases.
Establishing Simulation Neuroscience
The Blue Brain Project, founded and directed by Professor Henry Markram, was on a 20-year mission to work out how to forward engineer mammalian brain tissue on supercomputers from limited experimental data and discovered a revolutionary approach to reverse engineer the brain and a recipe to build digital brains. With around 300 peer-reviewed scientific papers, the project demonstrated that these digital brain models closely mirror real brain structure and function—enabling experiments that would otherwise be technically or ethically impossible.
OBI takes this legacy further, hosting virtual neuroscience laboratories where researchers can access:
- Open Data, data made available on AWS Open Data Registry under the Blue Brain Open Data.
- Open Software with 18 million lines of code to explore, build and simulate digital brains.
- Global brain databases curated by the project and the neuroscience community.
- An AI companion to guide exploration, modeling, and simulation.
Simulation neuroscience now joins experimental, theoretical, and clinical neuroscience as the fourth pillar to tackle the brain’s complexity. “The Blue Brain Project gave us the proof that the brain can be reconstructed in a computer from limited experimental data,” says Professor Henry Markram, Founder of OBI, who presented this breakthrough at this year’s World Economic Forum. “Today, the OBI brings the recipe to build and simulate the brain to empower researchers to explore the brain in unprecedented detail, and at a scale and speed never before imagined.”
Sparking a Global Collaboration
OBI’s Virtual Labs allow researchers from any discipline, anywhere in the world, to construct digital brain models at multiple scales—from molecular pathways and individual neurons to entire brain regions and whole-brain simulations, in principle of any species, at any age, and in any disease state.
- Disease modeling: Study neurological and psychiatric disorders in digital brains.
- AI and cognition research: Use digital brains to inspire new forms of artificial intelligence.
- Brain-computer interface and neuroprosthetics: Prototype and test neural implants virtually.
Researchers can invite unlimited collaborators into their Virtual Labs, fostering global, interdisciplinary teamwork in ways never before possible.
Visionary Funding
The Blue Brain Project was established at EPFL in 2005, when Professor Patrick Aebischer, then President of EPFL, outbid several prestigious institutions to host and fund the project. His visionary leadership led to 300 million Swiss francs in Swiss Federal Government funding over 20 years. “We recognized that if scientists can replicate the brain in computers, we can explore its functions and diseases in completely new ways” says Professor Patrick Aebischer. “The Open Brain Institute takes our work at EPFL and extends it into an open, global resource. It is exactly what the community needs to accelerate progress and spark new discoveries.”
An EPFL Legacy
As one of the world’s leading research institutions, EPFL continues to drive science into innovation and impact. “EPFL is delighted to support this transition from a long-term audacious internal project to a non-profit platform serving the international neuroscience community,” says EPFL President, Professor Anna Fontcuberta i Morral. “The extensive work accomplished within the EPFL Blue Brain Project will continue to have impact under the Open Brain Institute, providing researchers worldwide with access to cutting-edge virtual laboratories.”
Over 22’000 students have already taken Blue Brain’s on-line courses on simulation neuroscience, preparing for the age of digital brains.
A Catalyst for Neuroscience Breakthroughs
The OBI enables rapid brain research, therapeutic development, and next-generation AI, helping to tackle some of humanity’s greatest challenges:
- The brain’s complexity: Understanding perception, learning and action to adapt and thrive, as well as developmental changes, species-specific adaptations, and the origins of disease.
- The economic burden: Exploring treatments for brain disorders that cost the global economy trillions annually, yet drug development remains slow, expensive, and inefficient.
- Neurotechnology innovation: Rapid virtual prototyping on digital brains to accelerate brain-computer interface, neuromodulation, and neuroprosthetic research and development.
- AI beyond machine learning: Studying biological intelligence could unlock new AI architectures and strategies to interact with the world in real time.
“The brain is the only known system that exhibits true generalized intelligence,” says Markram. “OBI’s virtual labs can be used to study how the brain’s natural architecture—evolved over millions of years—creates intelligence, offering radical new directions for AI.”
Join the Digital Brain Revolution
- The OBI opens its doors to the Virtual Labs on March 28, 2025.
- Researchers, clinicians, industry R&D teams, and AI innovators are all invited.
- Virtual Labs accommodate principal investigators, small research teams, and global consortia.
Reserve Your Virtual Lab Today
Visit https://openbraininstitute.org or contact the OBI Communications Office at info@openbraininstitute.org
Conclusion: The Dawn of Digital Brains
The Open Brain Institute marks a historic moment in neuroscience—transitioning decades of pioneering research into an open, global platform.
- For researchers, OBI means faster and cheaper breakthroughs.
- For clinicians, it means deep access to the latest findings on brain diseases.
- For AI innovators, it means working with the only system capable of generalized intelligence.
The next generation of brain science and technology begins now. Be part of it. Register for a Virtual Lab today.
- https://openbraininstitute.org, contact: info@openbraininstitute.org
- https://bbp.epfl.ch/bbp/research/domains/bluebrain/index.html
- https://www.epfl.ch/en/