The Institute for Psychiatric Neuroscience

What it reported doing in 2024

Ocd and depression are emotionally devastating psychiatric disorders with significant social and economic costs. An estimated 5 to 6 million people in the united states will suffer from ocd during their lifetime. The world health organization has said that ocd is among the 10 most disabling conditions in the world. One problem is that the medications used to treat ocd can take up to twelve weeks to exert their effect, and only 30 percent of patients will respond to their first medication trial. This means that those who do not respond must wait another 12 weeks to see if the second medication has any benefit. It is not uncommon for patients to have 3-4 medication trials to find a treatment that works. Patients with extreme symptoms may give up and take their lives. In fact, 14-17 percent of ocd patients will attempt suicide during their lifetime. An estimated 17-20 million american adults will suffer from depression each year. Severely depressed patients also have high suicide rates. Suicide is the fifth leading cause of death among adult males, and is the third leading cause of death for all young people ages 15-24. One reason for these high suicide rates is that significant percentages of patients with ocd and depression will not respond to treatments, in part because we do not understand what really causes these disorders. The ifpn has funded research related to the neurobiology of depression in the past, and maintained an in-house research laboratory program completing studies on the neurobiology of ocd that originated at vanderbilt university medical center. Our in-house research has been a continuation of work carried out by the founder that was funded through the department of psychiatry at vanderbilt university medical center. While scientists are aware that a specific circuit in the brain involving the prefrontal cortex may be involved in the pathophysiology of ocd, we do not understand why this circuit is aberrant, why medications known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or ssri's, that block the inactivation of a neurotransmitter called serotonin, are effective in the treatment of ocd, and why patients must take these medications for up to 12 weeks to get benefit from them. The purpose of the program was to show how ssris change the activity of nerve cells in the prefrontal cortex so that more targeted drug treatments might be developed that could normalize activity in the ocd circuit and reduce the amount of time that patients have to suffer, waiting for their ssri treatments to have a benefit. Such targeted medications could greatly improve the treatment and quality of life for those suffering from ocd. We attempted to determine how these medications affect the ocd circuit using an animal model in which we stimulated serotonin signaling in the brain. We wanted to determine how different cells in the emotional prefrontal cortex responded to increased serotonin stimulation. We chemically stimulated serotonin release in the prefrontal cortex then determined the number of nerve cells that were serotonin-activated by staining brain sections for a protein called fos, that is associated with neuronal activation. We wanted to determine how that activation was affected by short-or long-term ssri treatment. A preliminary study found that long term- but not short-term ssri treatment dampened prefrontal-stimulated neuronal activity. We also wanted to determine how different cell types in the prefrontal cortex responded to serotonin stimulation, and how those responses were altered by ssri treaments. In our preliminary work we found that serotonin affects the processing neurons within the prefrontal cortex differently than they affect neurons that project from the prefrontal cortex to other brain regions. More recent analyses have raised questions about these initial findings. Unfortunately, our most important experiment, a large definitive experiment designed to address these questions failed due to an inability to d

Financial Efficiency

• Mission deployment rate: Limited
• Program expense ratio: 100%; rating input score 100

Transparency & Controls

• Consistency checks: 100%; rating input score 100; 52nd percentile among comparable filings
• Major donor itemization: Limited

Sustainability

• Operating margin: Limited
• Total-asset coverage ratio: 0; rating input score 2; 2nd percentile among comparable filings
• Liabilities to assets ratio: Limited
• Officer compensation ratio: 0%; rating input score 56; 56th percentile among comparable filings

Growth

• Program expense growth: -31.4% per year; rating input score 0; 12th percentile among comparable filings
• Revenue growth: -24.7% per year; rating input score 0; 12th percentile among comparable filings
• Asset growth: -17.4% per year; rating input score 0; 11th percentile among comparable filings