GlaxoSmithKline is holding a collegiate competition intended to bring engineering and neuroscience together and draw out innovative ideas that may lead to new device-based brain therapies.

The company hopes to catalyze innovative technologies that advance the understanding of brain circuitry, and to develop therapies that address electrical signaling defects in neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s, cardiac diseases such as hypertension, and metabolic diseases such as diabetes.

Big pharma companies are always on the lookout for sources of new products to fill their pipelines, and these days they’re trying to do it in the most frugal way possible. Academic-industry partnerships that typically include licensing and financial commitments are a common tool for drugmakers, but there are other mechanisms as well to access innovation that can provide mutual benefit for companies as well as academia.

Scientific competitions allow researchers, both known and unknown, to gain access to funding from companies looking for innovative solutions to drug development or device problems. At the same time, competitions provide the sponsoring company first dibs at the best and brightest ideas. In a search for ideas that advance the field of electroceuticals, GSK is offering a relatively small investment of $1 million as prize money.

The money will be given at the third stage of an competition to identify critical roadblocks in the emerging field of electroceuticals, the application of very narrowly delivered medicines to modify electrical signals in the brain. The team that wins must provide a solution to overcome a major obstacle to be identified and put forth by a collective of researchers participating in an open forum scheduled to take place in December 2013.

“Researchers will need to embrace the languages and tools of other fields, and perhaps even dream differently. Much of the challenge lies in translating biological understanding into engineering specifications,” says Kristoffer Famm, vice-president of bioelectronics research and development at GSK.

This week the company launched the first stage of the competition, a program to fully fund and network up to 40 researchers in as many as 20 external labs that conduct exploratory work mapping disease-associated neural circuits. In a paper in the journal Nature announcing the competition and prize, Famm writes, “The first logical step towards electroceuticals is to better map the neural circuits associated with disease and treatment.” Then comes “creation of a map of disease-associated nerves and brain areas that identify the best points for intervention.”

This effort will take many groups working collaboratively. Early findings will be shared among funded researchers, and they will all retain their intellectual property rights. GSK is after the disruptive innovation that successfully overcomes the major hurdle.

GlaxoSmithKline’s partners in this competition include the Departments of Neurology and Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania, the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research, and the Departments of Biological Engineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.