Neurotechnology in Action: Tools for Analyzing, Repairing, and Simulating the Brain

Flora Liu, MD

The “Plenary Session: President’s Lecture: Tools for Analyzing, Repairing, and Simulating the Brain” opened the second day of the 2026 Annual Meeting, presented by IARS and SOCCA, with emerging technologies that are reshaping how scientists analyze, repair, and simulate the brain, held on Saturday May 2. Introduced by IARS President Oluwaseun Johnson‑Akeju, MD, PhD, chair at Mass General Brigham and the Henry Isaiah Dorr professor of research and teaching in anaesthetics and anaesthesia at Harvard Medical School, the session recognized early‑career innovation and transformative technologies in neuroscience spanning molecular to brain simulations.

The inaugural Emery N. Brown Early-Career Award—recognizing a scholar with extraordinary innovation, leadership, and promise in advancing anesthesiology within the first five years of their initial post-training professional appointment—was presented to Joseph Cichon, MD, PhD, assistant professor of anesthesiology and critical care and director of In vivo Imaging Center for Anesthetics and Psychedelics, at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. Dr. Cichon studies rapid‑acting psychedelic therapies, observing how drugs induce neuroplasticity overtime using two‑photon microscopy to observe drug‑induced neuroplasticity within living tissue.

The featured lecture, “Tools for Analyzing, Repairing, and Simulating the Brain,” was delivered by Edward S. Boyden, PhD. Dr. Boyden is a Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the Yang Tan Collective. Dr. Boyden leads the Synthetic Neurobiology Group, which develops ground truth-oriented tools to map brain structure, control neural dynamics, and observe activity across spatial and temporal scales.

Dr. Boyden first described expansion microscopy, first published in Science in 2025, a technique that physically enlarges biological specimens to enable imaging of nanoscale structures by binding anchors to proteins, RNA, or DNA to a swellable polymer network and then expanding the tissue. Structures such as synapses become resolvable while preserving linear spatial relationships. When combining expansion with lattice light‑sheet imaging, expansion microscopy allows imaging speeds hundreds of times faster than classical super‑resolution approaches, enabling faster, detailed visualization of neural circuits and synaptic organization.

There has been iterative expansion in the utility of microscopy techniques. By creating physical space between densely packed molecules, expansion allows fluorescent labeling of targets that are otherwise inaccessible, such as densely packed amyloid plaques. This has also been clinically translated to making protein and cells more visible through decrowding. This technology has allowed much more research into circuit, location synaptic, and protein structure. Expansion microscopy has now been adopted by research groups worldwide, with more than 900 publications to date. Reflecting on its accessibility, a recent Nature interview marking the method’s 10‑year anniversary highlighted how easily the technique can be learned, with open tutorials available at https://www.expansionmicroscopy.org.

Shifting from structure to function, Dr. Boyden discussed optogenetics, which enables precise, high‑speed control of neural activity. Optogenetic tools are derived from microbial opsins—light‑activated ion channels and pumps originally identified in Halobacterium halobium—that allow neurons to be activated or silenced using light. Beyond basic science, optogenetic strategies have reached clinical translation. Gene therapy delivering a red‑light-activated channel restored partial vision in a blind patient, enabling object recognition after a period of training.

Dr. Boyden then turned to a major challenge in systems neuroscience: imaging many biological signals simultaneously within living cells. To address this, his lab developed spatially and temporally multiplexed imaging techniques using genetically encoded fluorescent reporters. Spatial multiplexing separates signals by their location within the cell, analogous to accessing different cellular “nodes,” allowing multiple signaling pathways to be read out in parallel. This approach has been used to uncover how calcium signaling dynamics relate to protein kinase A activation following cyclic AMP stimulation in live hippocampal neurons.

Temporal multiplexing distinguishes signals based on their timing characteristics, allowing different biochemical activities to be resolved over time using a single imaging channel. This strategy enables simultaneous measurement of multiple kinase and cell‑cycle signals within individual cells without spectral overlap. Integrating these tools, Dr. Boyden demonstrated how distributed voltage activity can be imaged across the entire brain of larval zebrafish, capturing global neural dynamics with cellular resolution. Such approaches provide new insights into neurocircuit function and neurodynamics, with direct relevance to anesthesia by enabling mechanistic study of how anesthetic agents alter neuronal signaling, network coordination, and brain‑wide state transitions across space and time.

Dr. Boyden’s Synthetic Neurobiology Group continues to develop open, scalable technologies aimed at revealing fundamental brain mechanisms and enabling future strategies for brain simulation.