E11 Bio

Can we treat brain disorders by restoring neural connections? For centuries, neuroscientists could only guess. But connectomics—a method seeking to create a 3D model of every neural connection in the brain—is moving closer to providing answers. E11 Bio (Convergent Research) is at the forefront... If we could build a human connectome, we might finally understand how neural circuits shape consciousness and predict various disorders relating to the brain's wiring. This idea isn’t new. Mapping the brain began accidentally in 1848 when a metal rod blasted through Phineas Gage’s skull—turning him from hardworking to erratic. Gage's injury launched lesion studies, a method of linking structure to function by studying people with damaged brains. Today, neuroscience is moving past lesions. Tools like: • Electron microscopy (EM) to see neurons at nanometer resolution • fMRI to track brain activity in real time • Diffusion MRI to trace neuron wiring in living people are all widely available, but still slow & imprecise. The first connectome was built in the 1970s, mapping 302 neurons in C. elegans, a microscopic worm. It took over 10 years. In 2024, after decades of work, scientists also mapped the fruit fly’s connectome — 140,000 neurons. The human brain has 100 billion neurons. Mapping a mouse brain would take 15 years and cost $10 billion—a daunting task. But new tools could make it 100x cheaper and faster. This is where research nonprofit E11 Bio comes in. Their goal is to map an entire mouse brain in 5 years for $100 million—a 100x improvement. Their technology, called PRISM, has three key parts: 1. Expansion microscopy (literally swelling tissue to make neurons more visible) 2. Molecular barcoding (tagging each neuron with unique protein “barcodes”) 3. AI-assisted image reconstruction (to assemble the map faster) We explain their full technology stack in the article. But briefly, if they succeed, it could have big implications for neuroscience, including: • Faster human brain mapping • Better treatments for neurological disorders • Advances in brain-computer interfaces When E11 succeeds, the final connectome will be static; not dynamic.  And wiring alone will not tell us everything about a brain's function, or how it works. But still, history suggests structure matters. The Human Genome Project didn’t reveal everything about the cell, but it led to surprising tech that slowly transformed medicine. A brain map could do the same for neuroscience. Read & subscribe: https://lnkd.in/eVBwYWqS

🚀 We are looking for Imaging Data Scientists to join our mission to advance connectomics towards whole brain scale for humans and other mammals 🚀 In this role, you’ll help develop and deploy data pipelines for processing microscopy images, enabling us to map the mammalian brain at an unprecedented scale. Check out our jobs page for more details: https://e11.bio/careers as well as the roadmap on our approach: https://lnkd.in/gYs6A-ci Please send in an application if you are passionate about moonshot neuroscience and want to broadly accelerate science through a high-impact project with a tight-knit team.