Never is a long time ;)
> Woah! Links?
Any university with a neuroscience department does this. Go to your local university's website and browse what they're doing in that area: more likely than not you'll find something interesting. Basic research on neurons has become very common, and computer-based modeling is a fundamental part of it. The perception problem here is that, say, modeling the signaling behavior of locust neurons seems like a very inconsequential piece of the puzzle - but in reality it's what we need to do to figure this stuff out.
The fundamental problem in neuroscience research is not a lack of complexity, for now we need to move away from complexity in order to observe the behavior of basic building blocks. It may seem embarrassing how we're still at that stage, but it's where we stand.
http://www.math.pitt.edu/~bdoiron/
http://neurotheory.columbia.edu/~larry/
http://www.cns.nyu.edu/wanglab/
http://alleninstitute.org/our-research/modeling-analysis-the... (modeling group)
There are also some companies that are led by people with academic experience doing spiking neural network simulation and seem to be trying to commercialize it:
>That [simulating small subsystems of a brain] is what's already happening all over the world right now, in thousands of independently scoped simulations and experiments.
Woah! Links? The searches I can come up with aren't turning up anything besides that simulation of a rat cortical column and the various attempts at nematode uploading.