Notice Board

Congratulations to Drs. Nehal Thakor and Aaron Gruber on being awarded research grants through the New Frontiers in Research Fund. They have each received $250,000 (over two years) through the grant’s Exploration stream. The grants are designed to inspire projects that bring disciplines together to explore something new that might fail, but has the potential for significant impact. Nehal’s grant will allow him, and co-applicants Drs. Seyed Mehdi Jafarnejad, Marc Roussel, Stacey Wetmore and Paul Hayes, to employ expertise in several fields of research to investigate therapeutic targets for the treatment of glioblastoma patients. This team also involves nine world-renowned collaborators. Glioblastoma, a form of brain cancer, is difficult to treat and has a median survival time of 15 months. The need for innovative therapeutic approaches is urgent. Aaron and co-applicant Dr. Jörn Davidsen, a professor of theoretical physics with the University of Calgary, will study how the active compound in magic mushrooms (psilocybin) may rewire the brain so as to alleviate depression and anxiety, as well as boost creativity. They will use cutting-edge experimental and computational methods to investigate how psilocybin affects patterns of neural activity in mice. They plan to evaluate the claim that psychedelics actually do expand the mind as measured by the diversity of brain activity patterns, and that some changes will last many weeks after drug exposure. They will also work with collaborators, including Dr. Michael Stingl (Department of Philosophy), on the neuroethics and policy issues of using psychedelics for mental health treatment. The goal of this work is to bring neurobiological evidence to bear on this potentially useful class of compounds to treat the growing crisis of mood disorders.