Staglin Music Festival/NARSAD Rising Star Awardee, 2009
Francis Lee, M.D., Ph.D., of Weill Cornell Medical College, is a Rising Star winner for 2009! Dr. Lee is director of a laboratory whose main area of research is in basic molecular, neural mechanisms that are relevant to neuropsychiatric disorders. His proposal aims to shed new light on the genetic and biochemical causes of anxiety disorders, and to test for new medications to treat them.
Specifically, he will test whether a common human genetic alteration in a growth factor, brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), leads to changes in brain structure, biochemistry, and anxiety behavior across development. Using a novel mouse model containing this human genetic variant (BDNFMet), he has already elucidated novel phenotypes for affective disorders that had not been established in human carriers: a) increased anxiety, which is not responsive to fluoxetine, b) impairment in fear extinction, a defect in learning cues of safety vs danger. His hypothesis is that these behavioral consequences of the genetic variant BDNFMet are due to reduced BDNF availability during a sensitive period during postnatal development. He plans to treat these mice with pharmacological agents at different points in development in an attempt to increase levels of this critical growth factor, before the onset of behavioral symptoms. In addition to established drugs such as SSRIs, he will also try to isolate new agents to treat anxiety by testing an array of them on cultured neurons from these mice. Once he has found some positive agents that increase BDNF levels, he plans new tests to determine their therapeutic effects in his mouse model system.
If all goes well, his study will illuminate the mechanisms by which anxiety disorders develop, and lead directly to the discovery of new treatments for them.
Watch Dr. Lee's talk at Music Festival for Mental Health 2009
