The Precise Diagnosis and Treatment for Depressive Disorder
Depression is the most common severe mental illness, ranking second in the total burden of human diseases in the world. The rampant COVID-19 epidemic has accelerated its disastrous impact. Unfortunately, the diagnosis of depression still depends on clinical phenotype, lacking objective biomarkers, and various treatments have individual differences with low cure rate, which aggravate its high morbidity, high disability rate and high suicide rate. Our research group has been focusing on “screening and functional verification of biomarkers for diagnosis of depression and precise targeted and high-efficiency anti-depression intervention”, and has made a series of innovative progress, which has been funded by national key projects and authorized by Chinese and foreign invention patents. In the near future, it will mainly carry out the following three aspects of research:
1. Based on the cohort of patients with high homogeneity in the whole life cycle and combined with the screening and verification of multi-omics and bioinformatics, we are determining the candidate biomarkers of central origin.
2. Combined with various animal models with modern technologies of neurosciences, we are verifying the mechanisms of molecular and neural circuit of the candidate biomarkers and confirm their potential for diagnosis and treatment.
3. Around the biomarkers, we are developing molecular-PET diagnostic probe in vivo, the central delivery targeted molecular antidepressants and precise neural regulation technology, so as to comprehensively promote clinical translation.