22 July 2024
The winner of the 2024 Australasian Neuroscience Society (ANS) Illumina Neurogenomics Research Award was Dr Andrew Gibbons from the Department of Psychiatry, School of Clinical Sciences at Monash Health. His research aims to use genomic technologies to discover biological markers, within the blood, that could predict patient response to psychedelic medicines such as psilocybin.
“Psilocybin, a chemical produced by hallucinogenic mushrooms, is a psychedelic medicine that has shown to meaningfully reduce symptoms of generalized anxiety during psychotherapy for patients. However, not all patients respond. Characterising both the genes that underlie psilocybin’s therapeutic effects and the biological markers that predict its efficacy in patients with generalized anxiety disorder would greatly improve both the efficiency and experience of treatment for patients,” said Andrew Gibbons.
Genomics and transcriptomics are essential exploratory tools that help play a crucial role in helping discover novel biomarkers that predict treatment-response to psychedelic medicines in people with mental illness.
“During the clinical trial we collected blood-biospecimens from participants, including whole DNA and RNA, before and after treatment. The data generated from the Illumina Neurogenomics Research Award will help us to identify molecular signatures associated with treatment response to psilocybin-assisted therapy,” said Andrew.
This exploratory study will use a multi-omic approach to compare differences in RNA expression, gene methylation and gene sequence between trial participants that responded to psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy and non-responders.
This project is a collaboration between the Translational Molecular Psychiatry research program led by Prof. Suresh Sundram and the Clinical Psychedelic Laboratory led by Dr Paul Liknaitzky at the Department of Psychiatry, Monash University.
The team conducted a world-first randomised, double-blind, active-placebo-controlled phase IIA trial, in partnership with Incannex Healthcare, to investigate the efficacy of psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy for treating generalised anxiety disorder (GAD). https://www.incannex.com/clinical-trail/psi-gad/
“Amongst the trial participants with GAD, 44% of people receiving the treatment showed meaningful improvements in their anxiety symptoms with 60% of those who responded to treatment achieving remission of symptoms,” said Andrew.
“We are pleased to support Andrew with genomic technology through the ANS Illumina Neurogenomics Research Award, to further the team’s work at Monash Health to build better treatment plans for people with mental illness,” said Gretchen Weightman, Senior Vice President Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa (AMEA).
Andrew will present his project results at the upcoming the ANS Meeting in Perth on 2nd – 4th December 2024.
“This award is an annual opportunity, and we look forward to supporting further groundbreaking search into neurological disease,” said Gretchen.
The award was created to support a researcher from the ANS to advance their research using genomics. For more information about the award https://www.ans.org.au/awards/ans-illumina-research-award