The Laureate Institute for Brain Research was awarded an $11.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health this fall. Known as a Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence award, this is the largest grant awarded to LIBR to date. LIBR was founded by The William K. Warren Foundation in 2009. Funding for this CoBRE grant comes from NIH’s Infrastructure for Clinical and Translational Research initiative that funds research in states where populations are medically under-served.
LIBR serves as the administrative leader of the program named Neuroscience-based Mental Health Assessment and Prediction and results from a collaborative effort between the LIBR team, The University of Tulsa and the University of Oklahoma. “On behalf of the entire NeuroMAP team, we are thrilled with the NIH Center of Excellence award,” said Martin P. Paulus, MD, Scientific Director and President of LIBR. “This funding makes possible the collaborative advancement of mental health research for the benefit of all Oklahomans while also laying the groundwork for pivotal future funding in mental health science.”
NeuroMAP, under the direction of Dr. Paulus, will focus on mood and anxiety disorders, which are more disabling than any other mental health condition in the world. Currently, their treatment is based on trial and error and the mechanistic understanding of these disorders is in its infancy. Just like blood pressure and cholesterol levels in medicine, identifying objective measures that can predict treatment response and clarify the contributing factors to mood and anxiety disorders can transform how psychiatry is practiced. LIBR uses a “molecules to symptoms” approach focused on processes modulating “feeling good”, “feeling bad”, and “brain-body integration” to build computational models aimed to help patients understand how and why they feel depressed or anxious and what interventions might help them feel better. The long-term objective of the award is to establish mental health researchers who will develop neuroscience-based predictors of risk and outcome, as well as improved treatments, of psychiatric disorders.