Joint press release: Corticale, Inmatica and the Mario Negri Institute launch a pioneering project to study the brain and expedite new neurological therapies

Neurological diseases:
a sensor to read the human brain ‘cell by cell’

Corticale, Inmatica and the Mario Negri Institute launch a pioneering project to study the human brain and accelerate the development of new neurological therapies

Milan, 15 December 2025 – Corticale, Inmatica and the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmaceutical Research announce the launch of the AHEAD project – AI-driven High-density Electrophysiology for Advanced Drug Discovery, a new strategic initiative dedicated to the study of acute and chronic neurological damage and the development of innovative therapies. The project, worth over €4 million, is co-funded by the Lombardy Region as part of the “Collabora & Innova” tender notice, activated under Action 1.1.3 Specific Objective 1.1 of the Lombardy Region’s 2021-2027 ERDF Regional Programme, which supports complex industrial research projects and experimental development with high innovative potential in the Lombardy area.

Starting on 1 December 2025, the partners will begin a high-profile collaboration to develop and validate, over a period of 24 months, an advanced, ultra-high-resolution electrophysiology platform based on sensors capable of recording the electrical activity of individual neurons. For the first time, it will be possible to obtain extremely detailed space-time data on brain function and observe how each neuron responds to damage or neuroprotective treatment.

Giuseppe Santella, CEO of Corticale Srl, a start-up founded by the Italian Institute of Technology Foundation, reveals that: “The enormous amount of information collected by the electrophysiological platform based on the SiNAPS technology will be processed using computational infrastructures that include artificial intelligence and machine learning models, with the aim of extracting information useful for the discovery and validation of new medications. The project is therefore aimed at identifying the efficiency of new molecules more quickly and more accurately, reducing development costs and time, and expediting the availability of effective therapies for patients suffering from neurological diseases that are often untreatable today.”

A strategic collaboration for innovation that brings together complementary skills:
Corticale, project leader and innovative start-up at the forefront of neurotechnology; Inmatica, innovative PMI specialising in advanced software, artificial intelligence and machine learning; the Department of
Acute Neurological and Cardiovascular Damage at the Mario Negri Institute, an international centre of excellence in pre-clinical and clinical research.

The partners emphasise how AHEAD represents a technological and scientific leap forward, capable of generating an unprecedented amount of data on the brain and transforming it into useful information for developing more effective and rapid therapies, thereby significantly improving the lives of patients with neurological disorders that are often incurable today.

Thanks to the support of the Lombardy Region, the AHEAD project represents a significant step forward towards more reliable, efficient and sustainable research methodologies, with applications that could have a global impact on neurological health.