Five years ago, in June 2013, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s (HHMI) Janelia Research Campus initiated an international project with imec, the Wellcome Trust, the Gatsby Charitable Foundation and the Allen Institute for Brain Science to develop a next generation tool for electrophysiology.

The result of this collaboration was the Neuropixels probes, which were designed, developed and fabricated by imec in collaboration with HHMI Janelia Research Campus, Allen Institute for Brain Science, and University College of London. The performance of the Neuropixels probes and their potential for transformational neuroscience experiments was described in a November 9, 2017 paper published in Nature.

“The Neuropixels probe is the most advanced neural electrophysiology probe to date, thanks to the power of integration of advanced CMOS chip technology. I sincerely hope that the Neuropixels probe will revolutionize the way neuroscience research is performed and propel our understanding of complex brain processes and diseases forward. In addition, I hope this is the beginning of a journey of bringing together like minded funders of Neuroscience Research Tools and imec, such that there is continuous funding to provide path breaking tools to the Neuroscience community at a regular cadence leveraging the strength of Moore’s Law” said Barun Dutta, chief scientist at imec, who has led the imec Neuropixels program since inception.

Tim Harris, senior fellow of HHMI said: “Neuropixels was made possible by the generosity of our funders, HHMI Janelia, Allen, Gatsby and Wellcome, the world class engineering design and fabrication at imec, and the tireless work of the consortium to agree and test a single design. We hope this can be a technology development example for other life science research tools.”