Well a lot of folks are working on it.
I’m not sure if anyone has done anything strikingly successful with eg spiking neural networks or something.
These guys built a more biologically plausible model and got it to do very simple tasks
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a5c4/19fcd6ea6f33be067b665e...
Don’t know if their lab has had more success or not on practical tasks but that’s not really the point I guess