|
 |
||
      |
|
|
|
 Research & Giving News Article  Their Cutting-Edge Work is Transforming Knowledge about the Brain and Serious Mental Illness, Opening the Way to Better Treatments “I Sense We Are Entering a New Phase,” Says One Mental Health Expert NARSAD, which has given over $215 million in the form of 3,194 research grants to 2,477 scientists at over 400 institutions since 1987, is the world's largest donor-supported organization for research on a wide range of psychiatric disorders, including depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, anxiety, ADD/ADHD, eating disorders, autism, and substance abuse. NARSAD has also announced that Akira Sawa, M.D., Ph.D., is the 2007 recipient of the Staglin Family Music Festival NARSAD Schizophrenia Research Award. This award for $250,000 is made annually to a leading researcher in the field of schizophrenia. “We Finally Have the Tools in Hand” Jack Barchas, M.D., chairman of the department of psychiatry at Weill Medical College of Cornell University and chair of the committee that selected this year’s NARSAD Distinguished Investigators, says he has observed “a striking movement to research on schizophrenia and severe mental illness, as well as childhood disorders” over recent years. “I sense that we are entering a new phase, with a host of powerful techniques being used in both basic and clinical science, including imaging and genetics, but also cell biology and sophisticated behavioral and population-study methods,” Dr. Barchas said. The attention being directed to serious mental illnesses such as major depression, bipolar disorder, and especially schizophrenia, signals to Dr. Barchas that “we finally have the tools in hand to make important new efforts in these areas.” Dr. Herbert Meltzer, chair of the Young Investigator selection committee of NARSAD’s Scientific Council and Bixler/May/Johnson Professor of Psychiatry and professor of pharmacology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, is similarly sanguine about the promise of new research opportunities. Dr. Meltzer points to “an explosion in interest in genetics and brain imaging,” reflecting the growing number of genes identified as involved in brain disorders, and advances in imaging technologies, such as structural and functional MRI, magnetic resonance spectroscopy, positron emission tomography (PET) and other cutting-edge electrophysiological methods that make it possible to visualize detailed activity in the living brain in real-time. Recipients of the new NARSAD grants come from a full range of scholarly approaches not only in psychiatry and psychology but many other areas of medical and biological research. They were selected on the basis of the excellence and originality of their work and without regard to their institution of origin or discipline by members of NARSAD’s distinguished 94-member Scientific Council. NARSAD Grants Play Unique Role The Distinguished and Young Investigator award programs help to define NARSAD’s role in funding the very best scientists in areas of mental health research that hold the greatest promise -- a role that scientific leaders like Drs. Meltzer and Barchas say is distinctive in the world of mental-health grant-giving. “NARSAD Distinguished Investigator awards are viewed as a great honor for the recipients -- they’re widely seen as the most competitive in the field of mental illness research. But it’s vital that the public also understand their extraordinary importance as a funding mechanism for the best innovative research,” Dr. Barchas said. “These awards represent one of the few mechanisms for encouraging new and creative approaches at their earliest stage,” he elaborated. In Dr. Barchas’s view, the work they fund often represents “a leap of ideas” and tends to “have enormous potential for yielding profound results that can lead to new approaches to treatment for serious mental illnesses.” NARSAD Distinguished Investigator awards, Dr. Barchas specified, “permit proven investigators to test an exciting idea, obtain the needed preliminary data for an NIH grant, and then proceed with the next steps. Even relatively well-funded labs may not have flexible resources needed for innovative studies such as those routinely proposed in our applications. This is why NARSAD awards are so significant for the future of the field.” Over the past 20 years, the Young Investigator program has launched numerous outstanding and influential careers. Among many examples, Dr. Meltzer cites Dr. James Kennedy, a three-time Young Investigator award recipient, now professor of psychiatry and medical sciences at the University of Toronto, as one whose gene studies have inspired subsequent Young Investigators. Dr. Helen Mayberg, professor of psychiatry and neurology at the Emory University School of Medicine, is a leader in imaging studies. Recently, her research on neural networks in the brain, begun as a NARSAD Young Investigator, led to a novel treatment for severely depressed patients who fail to respond to antidepressant medication. The procedure, called deep brain stimulation, has generated international attention and a proliferation of new studies. In Dr. Meltzer’s view, what is exciting about the best contemporary research on mental health, and seen in the work of many NARSAD grantees, is that it traces “the trajectory from preclinical studies to translational research -- which is to say, it undertakes to translate basic scientific findings into actual medical advances with the potential to help millions who suffer from serious mental illness.” |
Media Contact
Upcoming NARSAD Events
Latest News from NARSAD
Spotlight
|
|
For the Media