Seed grant program aims to grow bipolar treatment options
Research and Therapeutics
The Dautens’ support has been transformative for our community, catalyzing many projects that simply wouldn’t have been done without this sort of flexible and daring support.
Venkatesh Murthy
With the foundation’s support, approximately 10 scientists across Harvard’s undergraduate campus, medical school, and affiliated hospitals receive grants each year through the HBI Bipolar Disorder Seed Grant Program. The first six years of the program already enabled these researchers to make real progress in several areas. Notably, HBI researchers have made headway in disentangling the roles of different types of serotonergic and dopaminergic neurons in the brain. The existing treatments for symptoms of bipolar disorder are known to influence these cells, but the complexity of behavioral effects resulting from promoting or dampening one type of neurotransmitter signaling makes it challenging to understand the nuances of their role in the disease. Scientists also need more information and tools to study the specific roles of different subtypes of neurons.
Two labs in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS—one led by Susan Dymecki, MD, PhD, a professor of genetics, and the other by Bernardo Sabatini, BS ’91, MD ’99, PhD ’99, the Alice and Rodman W. Moorhead III Professor of Neurobiology—have developed advanced molecular and anatomical maps of the dorsal raphe nucleus, a complex structure with diverse groups of serotonergic neuron subtypes. The new knowledge gained is likely to help researchers better understand the functions of the different subtypes, determine which ones might be critical to target in bipolar disorder, and hopefully increase the specificity of any new therapeutic strategies.
The lab of Maria Lehtinen, PhD ’06, an associate professor of pathology at Boston Children’s Hospital, has been studying the choroid plexus (ChP), a mysterious and poorly understood tissue found in brain ventricles that produces most of our cerebrospinal fluid. Lehtinen’s team has observed that choroid plexus cells express serotonin receptors, but the ChP’s connection to serotonergic signaling in the brain is largely unknown. To explore the choroid plexus’s possible involvement in bipolar disorder, the team created imaging tools to understand the function of ChP cells in explants and awake mice. The lab is now examining how mood disorder drugs might impact the cells.
“We continue to be very impressed by the great projects being funded by the HBI Bipolar Disorder Seed Grant Program, and we are excited to see how ‘thinking outside of the box’ will further push the envelope on how we learn about, think about, talk about, and treat bipolar disorder,” the Dauten Family Foundation said in a statement. Kent Dauten, MBA ’79, and his wife, Liz, are somewhat expert on the disorder, having studied it extensively after two of their four children were diagnosed as teenagers.
The foundation’s latest gift extends the seed grant program for another three years. Of the 10 newest projects awarded funding this year, four will investigate the role of sleep, circadian rhythms, and seasonal changes in bipolar disorder, while others focus on immune-related treatment targets and the genetics of the disorder. (See a list of the newest projects.)
“The Dautens’ support has been transformative for our community, catalyzing many projects that simply wouldn’t have been done without this sort of flexible and daring support,” says HBI co-director Venkatesh Murthy, PhD, the Raymond Leo Erikson Life Sciences Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and the Paul J. Finnegan Family Director of the Center for Brain Science at Harvard University.