Dr. Gustavo Turecki's work has been selected to receive a major grant under the Canada Brain Research Fund.

Canadian Minister of Health Rona Ambrose, along with Inez Jabalpurwala, President and CEO of Brain Canada, announced funding for 32 projects designed to accelerate research that will fundamentally change understanding of nervous system function and dysfunction and their impact on health. The research will advance knowledge and support development of new ways to diagnose and treat all types of neurological and mental illnesses.

Douglas-Bell Canada Brain Bank, an essential platform for brain research in Canada $2,028,000
McGill members: Naguib Mechawar, Michael J. Meaney, Guy Rouleau, Bernard Brais, Nicolas Cermakian, Salah El Mestikawy, Carl Ernst, Cecilia Flores, Anne McKinney, Gerhard Multhaup, Lisa Münter, Bruce Pike, Judes Poirier, Rémi Quirion, Pedro Rosa-Neto, Abbas Sadikot, Lalit Srivastava, Moshe Szyf.

The Douglas-Bell Canada Brain Bank (DBCBB) is one of the rare brain banks in the world to collect brains from people who suffered from diverse mental disorders, including schizophrenia, major depression, bipolar disorder, and substance use disorders, as well as brains from individuals who were affected with different neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and other dementias. This bank has access to a wealth of longitudinal data from its donors, and fulfills a large number of tissue requests from researchers around the world. The current funded proposal will help update the infrastructure of this highly essential bank, streamlining its operations to make the excellent resources available to the world in a more efficient and timely manner.

Hope through research

Récently, Dr. Gustavo Turecki, a psychiatrist at the Douglas and professor in the Faculty of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry at McGill, together with his team, discovered that the levels of a tiny molecule, miR-1202, may provide a marker for depression and help detect individuals who are likely to respond to antidepressant treatment.

“Using samples from the Douglas Bell-Canada Brain Bank, we examined brain tissues from individuals who were depressed and compared them with brain tissues from psychiatrically healthy individuals, says Turecki, who is also Director of the McGill Group for Suicide Studies, “We identified this molecule, a microRNA known as miR-1202, only found in humans and primates and discovered that it regulates an important receptor of the neurotransmitter glutamate”.

The team conducted a number of experiments that showed that antidepressants change the levels of this microRNA. “In our clinical trials with living depressed individuals treated with citalopram, a commonly prescribed antidepressant, we found lower levels in depressed individuals compared to the non-depressed individuals before treatment,” says Turecki. “Clearly, microRNA miR-1202 increased as the treatment worked and individuals no longer felt depressed.”