Fries receives Dunn Foundation Award
Gabriel Fries, PhD, assistant professor in the Louis A. Faillace, MD, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, was recently awarded a 2024 John S. Dunn Foundation Collaborative Research Award in conjunction with the Gulf Coast Consortia.
Fries will team up with Agenor Limon, PhD, MSc, of UTMB for the study. The John S. Dunn Foundation and the GCC’s goal of the award is to encourage new collaborations in the Gulf Coast region.
One of the requirements of the award is that principal investigators must come from different institutions. GCC also looked for studies that had the potential to lead to larger studies in the future and that had shorter-term applications into clinical studies when deciding who would win awards.
Fries and Limon’s proposal, “Exploring Excitatory to Inhibitory Synaptic Ratio as a Novel Target in Bipolar Disorder and Suicide,” is a two-year, $100,000 study.
They will investigate excitatory and inhibitory synaptic activity in brains of people who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and died of suicide, and how that activity compares to brains of people who had bipolar disorder but died of other causes.
For this purpose, the investigators will use an innovative method to micro-transplant synapses isolated from postmortem brains into frog oocytes to measure their activity through electrophysiology, as well as proteomic and transcriptomic approaches.
Fries said the high suicidality rate in individuals diagnosed with bipolar disorder is eight times higher than the general population. He said it is estimated that upwards of 25% of individuals with bipolar disorder will attempt suicide at least once in their lifetime, which is much higher than any other category.
Fries said the field of biological psychiatry has gained a lot of traction over the last several years. For many years, conditions like bipolar disorder and suicidality were seen purely as types of psychological pain that people were going through, with little consideration of their biological bases and how these could be used to develop new treatment modalities. Fries said that there are process happening in one’s brain that are beyond control. He hopes to find a way to target these problems through this study.
“This is a very significant problem we need to address,” Fries said. “We hope to get a better understanding of the biology behind suicide and bipolar disorder and hopefully use that information to develop better ways of treating both.”
More information on the grant mechanism can be found here.