Brain Boosters

Daryl Kipke is showing off his company's latest prototype, a state-of-the-art electronic chip. It's not the sort likely to end up powering your iPod, but it does produce a beat you won't be able to get out of your head—because this device is designed to be surgically implanted deep in your brain, where the chip will deliver electric signals to specific clusters of cells. Kipke's firm, NeuroNexus Technologies in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is developing and testing the device to deliver electric pulses that can relieve some of the symptoms of Parkinson's disease, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and depression. "Deep-brain stimulation has been poorly understood," says Kipke, who is also a University of Michigan neuroscientist. "But with this technology we can improve neuron targeting and tuning."

Kipke's device is only one of many new treatments in the pipeline for major brain disorders, treatments guided in some cases by the explosion in genetic data in the past decade. These illnesses already cost the U.S. alone more than $1 trillion a year in health-care bills and lost income, and that figure is almost certain to skyrocket with an aging population. As a result, money has been pouring into brain research—$5 billion in 2008 from the U.S. National Institutes of Health alone, plus hundreds of millions more from big pharmaceutical companies, major foundations, and even the Department of Defense, which wants to offer better treatments to veterans who suffer brain trauma. The result is an array of new approaches to boosting mental acuity and memory and restoring emotional balance in the afflicted.

But history makes clear that when re-searchers come up with a new treatment that makes us feel or work better, it's usually not just the truly sick who end up going in for an upgrade. The market for Viagra has gone far beyond those with medically documented cases of erectile dysfunction, for example. Casey Lynch, managing director of the neuropharmaceuticals market-strategy firm NeuroInsights, notes that much the same has happened with antidepressants. Before the current generation of these pills came out in the late 1980s, depression was estimated to afflict one out of 20,000 people, but today the figure is considered to be about one in 10 (due to more frequent and quicker diagnoses). The progress in developing treatments for illnesses that ravage memory and thought raises an important question: might the same tools be used to improve the functioning of minds that by most standards are already running fairly smoothly? We may well be approaching an era of designer brains, in which those of us feeling a little foggy or dull can have our IQ, fast recall, and self-confidence ratcheted up via the prescription pad or scalpel. "Some brain-related conditions we think of as ordinary," says Lynch, "may eventually become disorders, too"—including perhaps less-than-razor-sharp thinking.

The notion of a prescription IQ lift is hardly new. According to polls, about one in 20 college students, and higher percentages of professors, already illicitly pop some form of Ritalin or modafinil—legitimately prescribed for attention-deficit disorder and narcolepsy, respectively—to augment alertness, concentration, and memory. But these drugs have proved only mildly effective on normal minds, and carry potentially severe side effects ranging from addiction to overstimulation. Estrogen and testosterone supplements have also been only vaguely associated with improved cognitive functioning, and more strongly with serious potential risks. Meanwhile, about 4 million Alzheimer's sufferers worldwide take the drug donepezil, known as Aricept, to slow their mental decline, but most don't seem to benefit much.

Scientists had originally hoped that the decoding of the human genome would lead quickly to small groups of genes that control major mental disorders and traits, be they Alzheimer's disease, intelligence, or personality. That hasn't been the case; individual genes turn out in most cases to only weakly affect the brain, with most illnesses emerging from the interaction of large, complex networks of hundreds of genes. That challenge hasn't kept researchers from tracking down many of the genes in these networks to chip away at the genetic roots of mental disorders—and to come up with possible treatments based on some of those findings.

The result is that medicine may allow us to challenge our genetic inheritance and repair environmental insults to the brain, whether as Alzheimer's sufferers or just moody, forgetful people and hazy thinkers. Techniques undergoing testing now include altering genes within brain cells, or even pushing genes into creating altogether new brain cells. Neuro-logix in Fort Lee, New Jersey, for example, is developing brain-related gene therapies, which involve injecting harmless viruses that insert custom-built genes into cells. Though other experimental gene therapies have in the past often caused severe and even fatal side effects, Neurologix hopes to avoid them by targeting the viruses only at those cells that need repairing. The firm has a treatment for Parkinson's disease in clinical testing now, with versions for Huntington's, epilepsy, and depression in the wings.