Earlier this year, MGH Research Leadership announced the Rappaport MGH Grand Challenge Award, an exciting, ambitious, new philanthropic funding initiative made possible by a visionary gift from the Phyllis & Jerome Lyle Rappaport Foundation and designed to assemble and support multidisciplinary teams of outstanding investigators in tackling the most pressing medical challenges patients face and thereby improving human health. Each year, for a decade, with the help of a team of internal and external experts, the Research Institute will identify priority issues facing human health. Once the Grand Challenge focus area is selected, the Research Institute will solicit team applications, with the winning team receiving a $3 million award to advance their proposal.
The inaugural award was dedicated to Brain Health, and out of 63 highly competitive proposals submitted, the Rappaport Foundation has generously decided to fund twp of them.
One of the awards was granted to a team of researchers from the MGH Department of Psychiatry for their proposal, Biomarker Discovery for Suicide Precision Circuit Therapeutics
The Principal Investigator is Joan A. Camprodon, MD, MPH, PhD (MGH Psychiatry, MGH Neurology), and the team includes Randy Buckner, PhD (MGH Psychiatry, MGH Radiology, Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Harvard University Psychology), Sydney Cash, MD, PhD (MGH Neurology), Matthew Nock, PhD (MGH Psychiatry, Harvard University Psychology), Kristen Ellard, PhD (MGH Psychiatry), and Asif Jamil, PhD (MGH Psychiatry).
This proposal will allow the team to map the brain circuits linked to suicide risk and identify individualized markers that can guide future therapies. Camprodon’s team has identified specific brain circuits that are associated with suicide risk and behaviors, and this research indicates that it is possible to target these circuits with innovative neuromodulatory techniques and modulate their activity. Being able to precisely map and modulate these brain circuits lays the foundation for a new generation of precision neuromodulation therapies for psychiatric illness.
Read More
Camprodon JA, Lee E, Barbour T, Ellard K. Suicide circuit therapeutics: leveraging the efficacy of ECT and the focality of TMS. Brain Stimulation: Basic, Translational, and Clinical Research in Neuromodulation, Volume 16, Issue 1, 177 – 178.
