About SPARC

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.