San Diego-based Neurome is racing to chart the brain's neural circuitry in the hope of creating breakthroughs treatments for mental illnesses.

"All this information about the function of the brain has to somehow be stored in a database that is standardized and can accurately depict the molecular, cellular and circuitry patterns of brain activity so that researchers can look at it and determine what's normal and what's not, section by section, circuit by circuit. And that is the function that Neurome intends to provide to drug discovery companies, said Dr. Floyd Bloom, Neurome's chairman and one of its founders.

Neurome scientists have improved the technology so that now it takes about 35 minutes to collect the volume of data it previously took about seven hours to record, Bloom said.

They are trying to measure and record how over time the disease affects the connection and communication, or electrical charges, between the neurons and cells in the brain." (more)

Backed up by an all-star team and $13m in funding, Neurome is initially focused on Alzheimer's disease.  Although I expect valuable results from their work, they will have to solve the animal mental health model problem at some point, as human neural circuitry doesn't correlate precisely with mice neural circuitry.