Project description
Behavioural tracking system for antidepressant treatment response
Antidepressants (AD) are medications primarily used to alleviate symptoms of depression and other mood disorders. They work by affecting neurotransmitters in the brain, such as serotonin and dopamine, which play key roles in regulating mood, emotions, and behaviour. However, understanding AD mechanisms of action faces hurdles due to testing limitations. Funded by the European Research Council, the FASTer project aims to address this by creating an automated behavioural tracking system to decode treatment response. In particular, FASTer will identify the brain cells and circuits responsible for the fast-acting and sustained AD effects of psilocybin. Researchers seek to unveil genes and circuits activated during AD treatment, reshaping psychiatric disorder comprehension and expediting potent treatments.
Objective
Mental health disorders affect 84 million people across Europe and are associated with an economic burden of 600 billion/year. New evidence from clinical trials suggests that a single treatment with psychedelic compounds, such as psilocybin, can produce a fast (hours) and sustained (months) antidepressant (AD) response. However, many questions still remain about its mechanism of action, due to methodological challenges such as lack of knowledge of the brain cells and circuits where AD effects are taking place and limitations of the behavioral tests used to examine AD activity in rodents. Combining molecular, behavioral and advanced computational tools, FASTer will establish a groundbreaking and automatic behavioral tracking system to deconstruct the behavioral language associated with treatment response. In addition, FASTer will identify the brain cells and circuits responsible for the fast-acting and sustained AD effects of psilocybin. This is a move away from the traditional assessment of single behavioral readouts to unconventional group behaviors and endophenotypes in a translationally-relevant context that will cause a paradigm shift and revolutionize the field of behavioral phenotyping. Thanks to my unique know-how in bridging human and pre-clinical psychiatry, and to go beyond the state-of-the-art, I will combine activity-dependent labelling techniques and single-cell methods to identify the genes and brain circuits engaged during psilocybin treatment. To address the multidimensional nature of psychiatric disorders, I will manipulate gene networks related to the AD effects of psilocybin. The ambitious and innovative studies proposed here have the potential to change our understanding of psychiatric disorders, and transform the field of behavioral neuroscience. Ultimately, FASTer holds tremendous promise for translatability of preclinical findings and impacting the development of fast-acting and efficacious treatments for psychiatric disorders.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- natural sciences biological sciences neurobiology
- medical and health sciences clinical medicine psychiatry
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2023-STG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
171 77 STOCKHOLM
Sweden
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.