Human Neuroscience Platform

The Human Neuroscience Platform (HNP) at the Campus Biotech in Geneva provides advanced equipment and technical support to read signals from the human nervous system and disturb its circuits, as well as a set of tools to measure behavior in healthy volunteers or patients.

The HNP includes various resources with cutting edge technologies in the fields of neuroimaging, electroencephalography, psychophysiology, virtual reality, neuromodulation and robotics. It also has a clinical and sleep research unit and a Methods & Data facility.

The mission of the HNP is to provide an integrative framework that allows the neuroscience research community to better understand how the normal brain works but also how the pathological brain dysregulates. Indeed, neurological and psychiatric disorders are a major public health issue, as they are difficult to treat and affect the daily lives of patients and their families.

Partnership with the NCCR Evolving Language

The HNP hosts several facilities that are indispensable for the completion of the NCCR projects. Thanks to a partnership, all NCCR members have access to the HNP facilities. Furthermore, NCCR structural measures were planned on the basis of the arrival of a new human neuroscience machine, a Magnetoencephalograph (MEG), which will be operational in September. 

The co-director of the National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) Evolving Language, Anne-Lise Giraud, is one of the initiators of the purchase and explains the interest of such a scanner for research in Geneva: “Switzerland, curiously, had never invested in this precise tool, allowing long enough recordings without loss of signal, and access to directly localized neural information. It seemed logical to me to make sure that the community could benefit from this indispensable tool for human neuroscience, both clinical and fundamental”. The MEG will indeed be of great help in understanding language and hoping to find treatments for the disorders that surround it, such as dyslexia or aphasia (a pathology that affects the ability to express oneself and that can be acquired following a stroke for example).