Spotlight on 2016 SRF Recipients Lena Palaniyappan, Jean Théberge & Keith St. Lawrence

Lawson’s annual Strategic Research Fund (SRF) was established to fund research projects aligned with Lawson’s strategic research goals as outlined in our 2014-2018 Strategic Plan.  For the 2015-2016 competition, projects were to focus primarily on “inflammation.”

Project: Inflammation-related excitotoxicity in neuropsychiatric disorders

Bodily response to chronic inflammatory processes include general fatigue, lack of energy and motivation, loss of appetite and irritability or low mood.  All of these are strikingly characteristic of an episode of depression.  Despite the consistent association observed between inflammation and mental and neurological illnesses, the missing link in exploiting this knowledge for therapeutic purposes is a lack of understanding of how subtle inflammation results in the expression of complex disease phenotypes such as depression. Drs. Palaniyappan, Théberge and St. Lawrence will look to develop a way to concurrently study inflammation response and its potentially devastating consequence across the entire brain in order to establish the importance of inflammation.  By establishing the relationship between an inflammatory marker in the brain and the biochemical effect of inflammation, the proposed study has the potential to offer a cutting-edge solution that allows investigation of many neuropsychiatric disorders, starting with depression as a prototype.