From left: Judith Weissman, PhD, JD, MPH; Dolores Malaspina, MD, MSPH, MS; David Kimhy, PhD; Lotje de Witte, MD, PhD; and Cheryl Corcoran, MD
The recent recruitment of five specialists to the Department of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has revitalized research, treatment, and prevention efforts in the field of psychotic illnesses and has led to the creation of the Critical Connections Program, which will help advance these endeavors.
Critical Connections will incorporate the collaborative efforts of multiple specialties within the Mount Sinai Health System—including neuroimaging, psychophysiology, genetics, neural stem cells, immunology, and epidemiology—with the goal of using the latest technologies and developments to find personalized interventions and treatments for psychosis. Clinical sites across the Health System also will contribute to a shared biorepository of samples collected from people with these illnesses.
Dolores Malaspina, MD, MSPH, MS, a leader in the field of psychosis, and Director of the new Critical Connections Program, says, “The most fundamental human quality is the ability to connect with others. Severe mental illness, particularly psychosis in schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, and other conditions, disrupts this capacity and has an enormous impact on individuals, families, communities, and the general population.” The costs of social services, hospitals, courts, and prisons have an economic impact, as well. “In spite of significant scientific advances, we still know little about how to prevent and treat most psychotic illnesses. Breakthrough discoveries require innovative designs,” she adds.
Resilience, genetic susceptibility, family characteristics, environmental exposures, and other factors that account for the influences of nature and nurture will be studied by the program’s researchers. Pivotal changes occur in the brain throughout young adulthood that can be directed toward recovery and resilience. Plans call for educational training of medical students, residents, and fellows to translate new findings into evidence-based treatments.
Prior to her recruitment to Mount Sinai, Dr. Malaspina established successful clinical research programs in psychosis at the New York State Psychiatric Institute and at Bellevue Hospital Center. One of her currently funded National Institutes of Health studies that uses the Genomic Psychiatry Cohort examines the gut microbiome-brain axis, with respect to brain inflammation.
The following renowned recruits to the Icahn School of Medicine will be working with Dr. Malaspina to create a robust center of psychosis at the Mount Sinai Health System:
Cheryl Corcoran, MD, Senior Faculty, and Program Leader in Psychosis Risk at the Mount Sinai Health System, plans to launch two programs: a clinical risk and resilience research program for teens and young adults who have unusual thoughts, perceptual disturbances, and suspiciousness, and a familial-risk program for young relatives of patients with psychosis. Dr. Corcoran also plans to partner with community clinicians and experts in adolescent medicine to implement early identification and intervention programs for at-risk youth, and collaborate with basic and translational neuroscientists to study the pathophysiology underlying illness risk.
Currently, her main focus is natural language in neuropsychiatric disorders. Working with computational neuroscientists, Dr. Corcoran has identified language features that predict psychosis onset in at-risk youths. This includes subtle decreases in semantic coherence and complexity of speech (such as using shorter sentences and eliminating the words “which” and “that”). Funding from the National Institute of Mental Health has enabled Dr. Corcoran to study the neural correlates of these language abnormalities in a larger international cohort that will determine replicability and develop targets for preventive intervention.
David Kimhy, PhD, Senior Faculty, also serves as Director of the Experimental Psychopathology Laboratory, and Leader in New Interventions in Schizophrenia at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Dr. Kimhy will focus on the development of novel interventions for schizophrenia and investigate the pathophysiology and phenomenology of cognitive, affective, and social functioning in individuals with schizophrenia.
Over the past decade, Dr. Kimhy has pioneered the use of mobile phone technologies in the study of psychotic symptoms and functioning, and the use of active-play video games as part of aerobic exercise training aimed at improving neurocognition in people with schizophrenia.
Preliminary work from his laboratory indicates that aerobic exercise training is effective in improving cognitive functioning in this population, with improvements linked to exercise-related upregulation of Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF), a biomarker of neuroplasticity. His current funding includes an award from the National Institute of Mental Health supporting a multisite, single-blind, randomized clinical trial examining the impact of aerobic exercise on neurocognition and biomarkers of neuroplasticity in individuals with schizophrenia.
As Director of Education at The Mental Illness Research, Education and Clinical Center at the James J. Peters VA Medical Center in the Bronx, Dr. Kimhy will continue his longstanding commitment to training future researchers and clinicians.
Lotje de Witte, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, combines clinical work and scientific exploration in immunology in pursuit of treatments and interventions for psychiatric diseases. Her laboratory investigates the connection between the immune system and the pathogenesis of psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia, mood disorders, and autism.
Recently, Dr. de Witte set up a novel stem-cell derived brain organoid model to study microglia, and established the methodology to isolate microglia from postmortem brain tissue. Microglia cells are part of the immune system and involved in both inflammation and reconstruction in the brain, processes thought to be involved in schizophrenia.
After studying the cell biological mechanisms of HIV-1 transmission, Dr. de Witte used this experience to start a distinctive research line at the Brain Center Rudolf Magnus in Utrecht, the Netherlands. She received her MD and PhD at the VU University Medical Centre, Amsterdam. Her research has been published in Nature Medicine, the Journal of Clinical Investigation, PLOS Pathogens, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Judith Weissman, PhD, JD, MPH, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, serves as a Research Health Specialist at the James J. Peters VA Medical Center. Her expertise is in using national data sets to examine health care patterns in the mentally ill.
At the VA Medical Center, she will collaborate with other researchers to investigate the incidence and risk factors of suicide, along with the access and utilization of mental health care services among vulnerable populations, particularly military veterans with mental illness. Dr. Weissman will also research possible interventions. Suicide by veterans remains a critical problem, and few empirically based treatment strategies for suicide prevention among post-deployed military personnel currently exist.
Serving as a Senior Service Fellow at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention earlier in her career helped hone Dr. Weissman’s skill in analyzing large data sets. She has also investigated topics such as polypharmacy in the nation’s elderly and disparities in antidepressant prescribing practices.