Stimulating Peripheral Activity to Relieve Conditions (SPARC)
Learn about the SPARC Portal and the SPARC Program
SPARC Portal - Vision
Facilitate enhanced understanding of the peripheral nervous system to support the development of safe and effective bioelectronic therapies by driving collaborative neurosciences and providing online resources for accessing and submitting curated data and models, as well as dynamic knowledge-management and visualization tools.
SPARC Portal - Mission
To ensure that the knowledge and data generated by the NIH SPARC initiative is FAIR, to lay the foundation for sustainable growth of that knowledge beyond SPARC, and to foster a surrounding community.
Roadmap
To meet the Vision and Mission the SPARC Portal has a roadmap of future functionality to provide an open, sustainable online resource and infrastructure for autonomic neurosciences and bioelectronic medicine to the global scientific community, and to foster collaboration.
Professor Peter Hunter to Give Plenary Talk at EMBC
Physiome Modelling & the 12 Labours Project. Distinguished Professor and Director of the Auckland Bioengineering Institute (ABI), Dr. Hunter's research is in modeling human physiology for clinical applications. He is currently leading MAP-core at SPARC.
July 10, 2023
The NIH SPARC Program
The Stimulating Peripheral Activity to Relieve Conditions (SPARC) program is supported by the NIH Common Fund to provide a scientific and technological foundation for future bioelectronic medicine devices and protocols.
The goal of the SPARC program is to identify neural targets and accelerate the development of therapeutic devices that modulate electrical activity in the vagus and other nerves to help treat diseases and conditions, such as hypertension and gastrointestinal disorders, by precisely adjusting organ function.
Some of the ways the SPARC program is working to advance this goal include:
- Constructing anatomical and functional datasets from organ-specific neural circuitry, including those that mediate visceral pain.
- Mapping the human vagus nerve, including circuit-level descriptions of human vagal anatomy and physiology.
- Creating new tools and technologies, including open-source neuromodulation platforms, to enable precise manipulation and measurement of nerve-organ interactions and their associated functions.
- Establishing effective research partnerships with clinicians, basic scientists, engineers, and private industry to pursue data-intensive, mechanistic clinical studies.
- Implementing prize challenges for the research and development community to demonstrate proof-of-principle neuromodulation therapeutic benefits with limited off-target effects.
- Developing the SPARC Portal to make high value autonomic nervous system data sets, maps, and computational studies freely available to the wider research community.
Funding Opportunities: See current SPARC and related funding opportunities.
