How is a brain research scientist born?
For Dr. Ian Winship, conception occurred in the early 1990s at Bev Facey Community High School, in suburban Sherwood Park.
"As a high school student I was always interested in biology, so I guess that's where it all started for me," says Winship, Director of the Neurochemical Research Unit (NRU) in the University of Alberta's Department of Psychiatry.
That prompted Winship to enroll in a Bachelor of Science program at the U of A in 1994, where he discovered the world of neuroscience. Still, it wasn't exactly love at first sight. More like an awkward first date.
"I actually didn't do that well in my first few neuroscience courses," he admits. "But I became fascinated over time, and got some research experience working in a lab that studied visual neuroscience. That's where I fell in love with the anatomy of the brain."
In 2005, Winship completed his PhD in the same lab, under the supervision of Dr. Doug Wylie. By then, he was eager to find a research project that was both "cool and cutting edge" as well as more closely linked to the real-world clinical needs of patients.
"Rather than just studying how the brain worked, I wanted to study what goes on in the injured or damaged brain, and what that might tell us about how we can better treat different brain disorders," he says.
That led Winship to a two-year Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of British Columbia under the guidance of Dr. Timothy Murphy, a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry's Basic Neurosciences Program.
"That's where I learned some really cool imaging techniques in these model systems. We'd look into the live brain, at the function and structure of the brain, changing in real time. And then I got into stroke research, looking at how the brain rewires itself after a stroke and undergoes some really fundamental changes," he explains.
Winship's research on brain plasticity and stroke earned him several academic awards, and a faculty appointment in the U of A's Department of Psychiatry. He was named an Assistant Professor in 2007, and in 2014, he was appointed Associate Professor and Director of the NRU, where he has continued and expanded the scope of his research.
The NRU is a team of 13 scientific researchers, who are engaged in studying the complex interplay between brain chemistry, environment, genetics, and brain health. Their research spans all pillars of research, from reductionist isolated cell culture preparations to human clinical trials.
Their overriding objective: to define the fundamental neurobiology that underlies a functioning, healthy brain, and to better understand the brain dysfunction that occurs with mental illness. The insights gleaned from the NRU's research are then used to develop and validate novel therapies to reduce the burden of brain disorders in humans.
"The NRU's goal has always been to link basic or fundamental science with the clinical side of mental health. So we take a multi-disciplinary approach in looking at the fundamental biology of the brain and what goes on in the brain, in those afflicted with mental illness," he says.
"We're also trying to take that information and look for better ways to treat mental illness and improve mental health, which gets into experimental therapies or treatments. We want to understand what's going on in the brain and what leads to these debilitating disorders."
The NRU's breadth of research is wide-ranging. Here are some highlights, as noted on the NRU's website, along with the names of the researchers involved in the studies:
• Identification of a novel approach to antipsychotic pharmacotherapy that delivers rapid and long-lasting relief of the symptoms of schizophrenia in patients (Dr. Serdar Dursun, Dr. Glen Baker, Dr. Jaime Hallak)
• Research to identify the genetic and biochemical factors - or biomarkers - associated with risk to mental illness and addictions, and with response to treatments, to facilitate personalized medicine (Dr. Katherine Aitchison)
• Investigations of the role of specialized components in the extracellular matrix that surrounds neurons in the brain and spinal cord, in the pathophysiology and treatment of psychiatric and neurological disorders (Dr. Ian Winship)
• Development and validation of school-based interventions to reduce youth depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation (Dr. Peter Silverstone)
• Investigation of the interaction between adverse childhood experiences, recent adverse life events, genetic vulnerability and exposure to cannabis in individuals with psychotic illnesses (Dr. Katherine Aitchison)
• Studies of the relationship between cellular stressors, their impact on the function of the immune cells of the brain, and the consequences for brain function (Dr. Kathryn Todd)
• Studies using high field Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to define structural abnormalities in the fronto-limbic structures of the brain in patients with major depressive disorder (Dr. Nick Coupland)
"Some of the work we're doing in novel systems is to look for novel biomarkers, or what I like to think of as core features of psychiatric diseases," says Winship.
"For example in my lab, what we're really interested in are changes to components of what we call the extracellular matrix, which surrounds brain cells. We've used model systems to look at these structures and we've found that if you provide a kind of developmental insult - if you make a pregnant mother sick for example, as we do in models - you then see offspring that have this schizophrenia-like phenotype," he explains.
"And when you look in their brain you see that some of these matrix structures change. But they don't actually change from what we would consider normal until the point at which symptoms develop. That's exciting to us, because it suggests the structures might be involved in this disease pathology."
There are already well-known and well-tolerated drugs available that can prevent the breakdown of these matrix structures, Winship notes. "So if we can show that the loss of these structures is important in developing schizophrenia, and these drugs could perhaps be used as a kind of preventative treatment, that would be pretty novel."
The research Dr. Katherine Aitchison is currently pursuing on cannabis is particularly timely, in view of the federal government's pending move in July to legalize recreational marijuana use, Winship says.
"Dr. Aitchison is a psychiatrist but she is also a psychiatric geneticist. So she is interested in the interplay between genes and mental health, and looking at biomarkers genetically that predict not just disease severity, but also the response to different medications," he explains.
"One of the topical things she is interested in now is the interactions between one's environment - including adverse childhood experiences or recent life events - and how that relates to genetic vulnerability, exposure to cannabis in individuals, and the onset of psychosis."
At the other end of the research spectrum, Dr. Andrew Greenshaw and Dr. Serdar Dursun are exploring the use of advanced technologies such as machine learning to improve the diagnosis of psychiatric disorders.
"They've been working with a computational psychiatry group and neuroimagers to find methods to pool the many bits of information from clinical data and imaging data into these large machine learning paradigms," says Winship.
"The hope is this would allow us to better diagnose and better track or predict the progression of psychiatric disorders. Their research is done entirely with human clinical populations and it complements the basic science side of things here."
Aside from conducting research, one of Winship's key goals as Director of the NRU is to encourage more dialogue and collaboration.
"The most crucial thing is to get people in the same room together, at least figuratively, and get them talking about their research. In psychiatry a lot of disorders are comorbid, and a lot of the questions we ask in models are relevant to people in the clinic," he says.
"However, we need to make sure we're asking questions that are relevant from the clinical perspective. So basic scientists need to make sure that what we're asking, and the answers we're getting, have value and can eventually contribute in clinical treatment. That is the goal."
To promote more cross-discipline collaboration, the NRU plans to host a symposium in late March at Lister Hall on opioid addiction.
"Our focus is to get anybody with an interest in the research in the same room. It isn't restricted to researchers or academics. It could include people from the health care field, or allied health professionals, or anybody really with an interest in this, including the public. We want to start increasing the discourse between different groups of people who have widely different areas of expertise on the same topic."
A second symposium is planned later in the year, focused on cannabis use and cognition, featuring the research work of Dr. Aitchison.
And what is Winship's long-term vision for the NRU?
"I'd like to see it continue to grow and continue to incorporate multiple avenues of investigation. I'd like to see it be a research catalyst for the department and the university," he says.
"I really want it to be the first place people think of at this university for mental health research on any level, whether it's research at the level of a cell or at the level of a patient. And I want to get people talking about things that aren't just important scientifically, but important to the public and to the government as well."