NIMA (Neuroimmunology of mood disorders and Alzheimer’s disease)
Published: 16 January 2018
The mission of this project is to test the proposition that anti-inflammatory drugs could have significant anti-depressant benefits for an immunologically-stratified group of depressed patients.
The mission of this project is to test the proposition that anti-inflammatory drugs could have significant anti-depressant benefits for an immunologically-stratified group of depressed patients.
As part of the detailed description of the immunological profile in patients stratified by therapeutic response, this project will aim to obtain a transcriptomic profile on PBMCs that will give a detailed indication of nature of the immune response in patient subsets.
To identify the subset of depressed patients that is most likely to respond preferentially to an anti-inflammatory drug, RNA Sequencing of PBMC derived RNAs from about 200 patients with depression (including treatment resistant depression) and 50 healthy subjects has been undertaken and first pass RNA-seq data analysis completed. The overall preliminary results showed possible cytokine/chemokine signalling pathway enrichment in depression. Stratification analysis, gene-level analysis, transcript-level analysis and network analysis are now being conducted and it is anticipated that the results will be available for the Node research symposium.
First published: 16 January 2018