The 2018 NARSAD Young Investigator grantees from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation include four faculty members from the Department of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Their research aims are listed below.
Michael Sean Breen, PhD, will leverage an established cohort of mothers and infants to investigate the effects of maternal PTSD. Using samples of the newborns’ umbilical cord blood, Dr. Breen will examine the patterns of gene expression in babies born to mothers with and without PTSD. The study will also include analysis of gene expression in samples from the babies at two years of age, providing measurements of the effects of maternal PTSD on children over time.
Alexander William Charney, MD, envisions a future in which it is possible to assess mental illnesses via a routine blood draw, and will search for cues from immune system that may aid to make this concept feasible. These cues, Dr. Charney believes, may be found in genetic messages floating around patients’ cells, presumably in transit to help accomplish immune-related tasks. To find them, Dr. Charney will draw genetic information from single cells in blood and brain samples in psychiatric patients, revealing additional insights into whether certain cell subtypes regulate interactions between the brain and the rest of the body.
Rebecca Sue Hofford, PhD, hopes to lay the groundwork for a drug to treat addiction to cocaine and other psychostimulants. She previously found a link between cocaine-induced behaviors and the activity of granulocyte-colony stimulating factor, or G-CSF, which is a cytokine—a signaling protein released by the immune system. Her team now hopes to identify which neurons are affected by G-CSF in the nucleus accumbens, a brain region that is associated with reward processing and involved in addiction. They will study how affected neurons change their activity in response to G-CSF.
Eva Velthorst, PhD, will explore how parental genes that are not passed on to the child may nevertheless help explain the link between childhood adversity and the development of psychosis. It is theorized that such non-inherited genes are able to affect the child through their parents’ contribution to the child’s environment. This phenomenon, called “genetic nurturing,” has been largely ignored in genetic studies but may point to preventable exposures, Dr. Velthorst suggests. Leveraging the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children study, the team will integrate genetic and developmental data on 3,000+ individuals followed from birth up to age 24, and their parents. This will provide the opportunity to examine the effect of non-transmitted genes of the mother and father separately (accounting for the transmitted genes) in the childhood adversity-psychosis relationship.