Scripps Research-led team receives $14.2M NIH award to map the body’s “hidden sixth sense”

Ardem Patapoutian, Li Ye and Xin Jin.credits

An NIH-backed effort aims to decode how the nervous system monitors internal organs.

LA JOLLA, CA—How does your brain know when you need to breathe, when your blood pressure drops or when you’re fighting an infection? The answer lies in interoception: an understudied process by which the nervous system continuously receives and interprets the body’s physiological signals to keep vital functions running smoothly. Now, a collaborative team at Scripps Research and the Allen Institute have received the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s Transformative Research Award to create the first atlas of this internal sensory system.

Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Ardem Patapoutian will lead the project with Li Ye, the N. Paul Whittier Chair in Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Scripps Research, and Bosiljka Tasic, the Director of Molecular Genetics at the Allen Institute. As a co-investigator, Scripps Research Associate Professor Xin Jin will lead the genomic and cell type identification part of this NIH-backed initiative. The team will receive $14.2 million in funding over five years.

“My team is honored that the NIH is supporting the kind of collaborative science needed to study such a complex system,” says Patapoutian, the Presidential Endowed Chair in Neurobiology at Scripps Research.

Patapoutian, who shared the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering cellular sensors of touch, will use the NIH award with his team to decode interoception.

“We hope our results will help other scientists ask new questions about how internal organs and the nervous system stay in sync,” adds Ye. Like Patapoutian, he’s also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.

Established in 2009, the Transformative Research Award supports interdisciplinary projects that cross conventional boundaries and open new directions in science. This accolade is part of the NIH Common Fund’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research program, which promotes ideas aimed at filling major gaps in our understanding of human health—the kind of endeavors that might struggle to gain funding through traditional channels.

Unlike classic senses, such as smell, sight and hearing—which are external and rely on specialized sensory organs—interoception operates through a network of neural pathways that monitor functions like circulation, digestion and immune activity. Because these signals come from deep within the body and are often processed outside conscious awareness, interoception is often described as our “hidden sixth sense.”

Despite its importance, interoception has been historically neglected because of its complexity. Signals from internal organs spread widely, often overlap and are difficult to isolate and measure. Sensory neurons that carry these messages weave through tissues—ranging from the heart and lungs to the stomach and kidneys—without clear anatomical boundaries.

With support from the NIH, the team will chart how sensory neurons connect to a wide range of internal organs, including the heart and gastrointestinal tract. Using their findings, the researchers aim to build a comprehensive atlas that anatomically and molecularly catalogs these neural pathways.

The anatomical part of the project will label sensory neurons and then apply whole-body imaging to follow their paths from the spinal cord into different organs, generating a detailed 3D map of the routes and branching patterns. In the molecular component, the team will use genetic profiling to identify the various cell types of sensory neurons—for example, showing how neurons that send signals from the gut differ from those linked to the bladder or fat. Together, these complementary datasets will produce the first standardized framework for mapping the body’s internal sensory wiring.

By decoding interoception, the team also hopes to uncover core principles of body-brain communication that could guide new approaches to treating disease. Dysregulation of interoceptive pathways has been implicated in conditions ranging from autoimmune disorders and chronic pain to neurodegeneration and high blood pressure.

“Interoception is fundamental to nearly every aspect of health, but it remains a largely unexplored frontier of neuroscience,” says Jin, who’s a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Freeman Hrabowski Scholar. “By creating the first atlas of this system, we aim to lay the foundation for better understanding how the brain keeps the body in balance, how that balance can be disrupted in disease and how we might restore it.”