Predicting clinical response to medicines in psychiatry by genetics and inflammatory markers in blood

A number of you know that when I am not at medical school I  into the proverbial phone booth and become "neuroscience man". Over the last year or so some of the fruit of my labours are ripening and a couple of papers have come of it.

The focus of my thesis has been more flood light than laser. During the last four years I have studied the ability of peripheral markers to explain aspects of the presentation of depression and predict the outcome of the treatment.  I have also been looking at the genetics of personality, the genetics of psychotropic drug-induced appetite change and the bulk of my work lately revolves around giving antidepressants to rats and screening the mRNA expression all of the ~30,000 rat genes in their blood to identify candidate biomarkers for human trials.


But? you ask. "But depression is a brain disease why look in the blood?" the reason is clear for us. To have any chance at realistically developing tests in the clinic to be used by prescribers, GPs and Psychiatrists, you cannot have them expect to tell the patient "in order to better manage your mood disorder, I am going to need a small slice of your hippocampus". Oh dear! Better to ask "now we need a 5ml blood sample to help us predict what treatment is best for you". Much nicer.


To those that were keen to see our recently published papers in the Journal of Pharmacology here they are:

Orosomuciod influences antidepressant response

Elevated CRP predicts good outcome for antidepressant treatment and poor to psychotherapy.

The other paper that we have recently gotten out there is this one in Acta Neuropsychiatrica:

Polymorphism upstream from INSIG2 influences response to carnitine in valproate-induced weight gain