$1.6m NHMRC grant awarded to advance treatments for neuropsychiatric disorders
A new research program aims to improve treatment for neuropsychiatric disorders such as major depressive disorder (MDD) through personalised, non-invasive transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).
Dr Robin Cash from the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, has received a 2022 National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Investigator Grant of $1,576,390 to lead the five-year project.
Dr Cash is also funded through a fellowship from the Australian Research Council. His expertise spans brain stimulation, neuroimaging, neuroscience and depression, and he has trained in a number of leading research groups in Frankfurt, New York and Toronto.
He recently established a novel approach to the use of TMS therapy in the treatment of MDD, by using brain-based biomarkers of MDD response, rather than the skull-based landmarks that were conventionally used as targets for TMS therapy. This approach can be used to personalise TMS stimulation target sites to suit a patient’s functional brain architecture.
“Early research is showing that personalised TMS treatment could significantly improve treatment outcomes for individual patients, compared to conventional TMS therapies,” Dr Cash said.
“Over the past two decades, TMS has been delivered to roughly the same skull position for each patient, but every person’s brain circuitry is different. This is especially true for frontal brain regions that are involved in depression and which are targeted by TMS. This means that traditional approaches end up targeting different brain circuits in different individuals, and this may lead to variable treatment outcomes across individuals.
“We have developed a technique to enable TMS targeting that is optimised to suit each individual and the spatial architecture of their brain circuitry.
“Our interstate collaborators Dr Luca Cocchi and Dr Bjorn Burgher have since established the first clinic in Australia to offer personalised TMS therapy and our approach has now been adopted by several groups around the world. In parallel, other groups around the world are working on this approach and have demonstrated striking leaps in clinical efficacy. However, research is still in its early days and there is plenty more work that needs to be done.”
One in seven Australians will experience depression in their lifetime, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and the condition has the third highest burden of all diseases in Australia (13%), according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.
TMS is a painless procedure that uses magnetic fields to stimulate nerve cells in the brain. It involves delivering repetitive magnetic pulses through an electromagnetic coil placed on a patient’s scalp, which stimulates nerve cells in the region of the brain involved in mood control and depression.
Dr Cash and his team seek to drive new innovations in this area and engineer a next-generation version of TMS therapy that is more precise, more effective and more reliable. They will be looking to further validate and enhance TMS personalisation methodology for MDD and in future extend and tailor this approach to suit other psychiatric conditions.