Understanding Treatment-Resistant Depression

Treatment-resistant depression (TRD) is a particularly challenging form of major depressive disorder. As Albino Oliveira-Maia, head of the Champalimaud Foundation’s Neuropsychiatry Unit and the study’s national coordinator for Portugal, explains, “TRD is defined as the persistence of depressive symptoms despite adequate courses of at least two different antidepressant medications”. Despite repeated therapeutic attempts, these patients’ depressive symptoms remain.

Why we have a brain

“The brain’s primary function is movement”, explains Claudia Feierstein, lead author of the study published today in Current Biology. “Plants don’t need a brain because they don’t move. Yet, even for something as seemingly simple as eye movements, the brain’s role remains largely enigmatic. Our goal is to illuminate this ‘black box’ of motion and to decode how neural activity controls eye and body movements, using zebrafish as our model organism”.

The distinguished recipients from Portugal are Giulia Ghedini and Ilana Gabanyi from the Gulbenkian Science Institute (IGC) and Carlos Minutti of the Champalimaud Foundation. The principal investigators will be granted between €1.5-1.9M each to develop their research proposals over the next five years.