Team Led by Neuroengineer Paul Sajda Wins $12M DARPA Grant for Research on Depression and Suicide
Columbia Engineering’s multi-institutional team includes engineers, neuroscientists, and clinicians at the Medical University of South Carolina, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of Oklahoma.
Paul Sajda is the Vikram S. Pandit Professor of Biomedical Engineering and a professor in electrical engineering and radiology. His research is interested in what happens in our brains when we make a rapid decision and, conversely, what processes and representations in our brains drive our underlying preferences and choices, particularly when we are under time pressure.
Traumatic stress can have devastating effects on people, in particular those in the military, including mental illness, substance abuse, post-traumatic stress disorder, family violence, and suicide. Developing effective approaches to prevent suicide and improve treatments is a top priority within the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD).
New DARPA program
A new program from DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the DOD’s central research and development organization, has awarded $12 million to a multi-institutional team led by Paul Sajda, department chair and Vikram S. Pandit Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Columbia Engineering, to advance critical research in major depressive disorder (MDD) and suicide.
An interdisciplinary team
Sajda will be working with an interdisciplinary group that includes engineers, neuroscientists, and clinicians at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC), the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of Oklahoma. The team is a close-knit one -- many of them have been working together for more than 10 years, including collaborating on clinical trials that link precision neurostimulation therapy to clinical outcomes.
The grant is one of three research projects funded by DARPA’s STRENGTHEN program, Strengthening Resilient Emotions and Nimble Cognition Through Engineering Neuroplasticity, which aims to build on recent advances in neuroscience and clinical practice to increase well-being and prevent or mitigate the effects of traumatic stress leading to behavioral health disorders and suicidality.
Brain stimulation techniques for treatment-resistant depression
The researchers are building on NIH-funded work aimed at developing brain stimulation techniques to treat cases of treatment-resistant depression disorder. They recently completed a six-week-long clinical study that used repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), triggered by electroencephalography (EEG), to synchronize brainwaves, to induce a brain state known as “entrainment.” The study demonstrated that patients with better entrainment had greater treatment improvement, spotlighting the strong potential for EEG-informed rTMS therapy in cases of resistant MDD.
A new generation of psychiatric treatment
“The psychiatric field needs new ways to tackle treatment-resistant major depressive disorder, which does not respond to existing drug therapy or psychotherapy,” says Sajda, who is also affiliated with Columbia’s Data Science Institute. “Our team has decades of experience using innovative brain stimulation methods and multi-modal imaging in psychiatry. We expect our revolutionary approach in delivering individualized internal and external interventions to entrain brain networks will result in neuroplastic changes that improve clinical outcomes.”
His lab has decades of experience using innovative brain stimulation methods and multi-modal imaging in psychiatry. The DARPA-funded project — Realigning Emotion and COgnition Via prEcision Regulation of networkS (RECOVER) — is focused on developing a new generation of psychiatric treatment to guide the brain’s neuroplasticity, its natural ability to form new neural connections.
The clinical study will be run at MUSC, under the lead of co-PI Lisa McTeague, associate professor in the Brain Stimulation Division of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at MUSC. Dr. McTeague is also a practicing clinical psychologist in the PTSD Clinical Team at the Ralph H. Johnson VA Health Care System. She and her group at MUSC have been working with Sajda for 10 years.
Promoting brain’s cognitive flexibility and emotional regulation to overcome depression and process trauma
The team hopes to reduce clinical symptoms of depression, anxiety, and suicidality by promoting cognitive flexibility (CF) -- the mental ability to switch between thinking about two different concepts according to the context of a situation -- and emotional regulation (ER) -- a conscious or nonconscious strategy to start, stop, or otherwise modulate the trajectory of an emotion. Together, CF and ER are essential to overcoming depression and processing trauma.
The researchers posit CF and ER are strongly influenced by patterns of electrical activity in the brain, called alpha oscillations. They believe that tweaking alpha oscillations using transcranial magnetic stimulation can improve a patient’s cognitive flexibility and emotional regulation by encouraging neuroplasticity. When combined with interventions such as cognitive-behavioral therapy, this new approach has tremendous potential to transform mental health.
Applying functional magnetic resonance imaging, electroencephalography, and transcranial magnetic stimulation
Their approach brings together a suite of familiar techniques that noninvasively image and manipulate the brain. By simultaneously using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), the researchers hope to develop an entirely new approach for treating this debilitating mental disorder.
The team also hopes to translate their findings and build a less expensive and more widely available system based on simultaneous functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), EEG, and TMS. This part of the project will be co-led by the Investigator Han Yuan, associate professor at the University of Oklahoma’s Stephenson School of Biomedical Engineering.
“The clinical trials we have completed, funded by NIH and done at MUSC, have shown to be very promising, and this new DARPA award will help us extend the approach even further, adding hybrid treatments as well as expanding our approach to addressing other forms of mental illness, such as PTSD and suicidality,” says Sajda. “We will build on recent advances in neuroscience and clinical practice to increase well-being and prevent or mitigate the effects of traumatic stress leading to behavioral health disorders and suicidality.”