We are thrilled to announce that Prof. Vibe G. Frøkjær has been awarded a Lundbeck Foundation Ascending Investigator grant worth 5.911.743 DKK. This prestigious grant is for the proposed 4-year project 'Clinical translation of serotonin 4 receptor agonism: an antidepressant and pro-cognitive target' which is summarized below.
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NRU will take part in the new Center for Discoveries in Migraine (CDM), which is a new Center of Excellence funded by the Danish National Research Foundation and headed by NRU collaborator Prof. Messoud Ashina.
CDM aims to answer the overarching research question: “What neurobiological mechanisms initiate and terminate migraine attacks?”, and we look forward to contributing to finding the answers.
We congratulate Messoud on this fantastic grant.
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We are immensely proud to announce that NRU PhD-student Drummond McCulloch has been awarded the Lundbeck Foundation Talent Prize 2024.
With this prize, The Lundbeck Foundation seeks to celebrate talented young scientists who are dedicated and passionate about research. The prize is DKK 300.000, and the amount is split between a personal prize of DKK 100.00 and DKK 200.000 for research activities.
In the official nomination, Gitte Moos Knudsen and Patrick Fisher provided the following statement about Drummond's talent and examples of his role in and contribution to original scientific achievements:
Drummond McCulloch’s work focuses on using neuroimaging techniques to develop understanding of mechanisms of action of psychoactive compounds. With a background in drug development, his ultimate goal is to use this understanding to develop novel therapeutics for treating psychiatric and neurological disorders. Inspired by the transformative potential of psychedelic drugs like LSD and psilocybin for those suffering from treatment-resistant depression and cluster headaches, he has dedicated his career to deepening the scientific understanding of these compounds.
Drummond is driven to increase site-wide collaboration and enhance replicability in the field of neuroscience. In order to further this goal, he has worked closely with the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ECNP), as scientific secretary of the Psychedelic Transnosological Working
Group and in communication with the European Medicines Agency (EMA). He has authored two papers highlighting key knowledge gaps in the field of psychedelic medicalisation with the ECNP and one Lancet commentary with the EMA on the therapeutic potential of psychedelics from a regulatory perspective. Furthermore, he coordinated a consensus paper with major groups evaluating the acute effects of psychedelics on functional brain activity, setting guidelines for future research. This paper was published in Neuroscience and Biobehavioural Reviews, and presented at several conferences through oral
presentations to increase field-wide approval of the initiative. Drummond is also the head of the ECNP Psychedelic Early Career Researchers group and has been involved in organising several events to bring together young researchers to foster international collaboration.
During this process, he identified a key area in the field showing promise for elucidating the neural effects of psychedelics but lacking scientific rigour. Specifically, the acute effects on 'brain entropy'. Twelve papers have attempted to quantify the acute effects of psychedelics on functional brain entropy, each using different and not clearly related methods. Dissatisfied with such heterogeneity, he embarked on an ambitious project to replicate the methods applied in twelve different papers using data he helped to collect where participants were given high doses of psilocybin and underwent fMRI brain scans several times during the psychedelic effects. Collaborating with a mathematician, he created the 'Copenhagen Brain-Entropy Toolbox' (CopBET), combining neuroscience, information theory, and pharmacology. The results showed that certain brain-entropy metrics were strongly related to psychedelic drug effects, while others were not. Additionally, there was limited correlation between these metrics despite being presented as convergent. This offered a nuanced insight into how psychedelics work in the brain.
Additionally, CopBET is now openly available on GitHub and can be easily applied to new datasets, enhancing replication in the field. This project has been well received, leading to invitations to present and teach at conferences and workshops across Europe, and CopBET has been adopted by research sites across Europe and North America.
Drummond has set up and now coordinates two clinical trials focused on understanding the neurological basis behind the acute and persisting effects of psychedelic drugs in the human brain. The first project evaluates the acute effects of LSD. This project leverages simultaneous positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to assess target engagement of LSD at serotonin receptors in the brain while measuring changes in brain function by evaluating effects on blood flow, metabolic demand, and neurotransmitter levels. This project is the first study in Scandinavia to administer LSD to humans since the 1970s and the first ever to administer LSD in a PET scanner, let alone with simultaneous functional brain imaging.
The second project builds on some of Drummond’s previous work showing that psychedelics like psilocybin can have long-lasting positive effects on wellbeing, even in healthy volunteers. In order to investigate the neurological basis for this remarkable effect, Drummond has set up a deep-phenotyping study, recruiting 120 healthy adults who have never had a psychedelic experience. Participants undergo cutting-edge functional brain imaging, neuropsychological testing, questionnaires, and fluid biomarker sampling before and after a high dose of psilocybin or placebo to evaluate the persisting effects of psilocybin and identify baseline characteristics that predict positive outcomes. In close collaboration with medical doctors, this project also closely monitors any potential acute and persisting adverse effects of psilocybin, providing valuable information for the future of precision psychedelic medicine by evaluating whether these can be predicted using baseline phenotyping.
Drummond’s research in neuroimaging and psychoactive compounds has significantly advanced our understanding of these areas. His work on the Copenhagen Brain-Entropy Toolbox and leading clinical trials highlights his dedication to scientific progress and collaboration. By promoting international cooperation and ensuring scientific rigour, Drummond has made meaningful contributions to the field of psychedelic medicine. These efforts demonstrate his alignment with the goals of the Lundbeck Foundation Talent Prize, making him a strong candidate for this award.
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It is with great pleasure that we can announce that our collaborator Prof. Russell Poldrack, Department of Psychology & Head of the Center for Open and Reproducible Science, Stanford University, United States has been awarded Rigshospitalet's International KFJ Award 2024.
We have for several years collaborated with Russ through our joint program OpenNeuroPET and with NRU scientists Melanie Ganz-Benjaminsen and Cyril Pernet spearheading this. Moreover, former NRU PhD student, Martin Nørgaard, who was a postdoc in Russ’ laboratory at Stanford and is now an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at NRU/DIKU also serves as a link and we have ten joint publications emerging from this exciting collaboration.
Russ Poldrack is a cognitive neuroscientist and data scientist, with 249 registered publications on PubMed, an exponential growth of per-year citations in Google Scholar and an h-index of 138. His group has made important contributions to the basic understanding of how decision making and executive control are implemented in the human brain. He is also one of the world’s leading experts in data sharing and open science within biomedical research, and has developed a number of widely used open-source tools for data analysis and sharing. In addition, Poldrack has exceptional personal, managerial and collaborative skills. For several decades, Poldrack has been one of the most engaging, influential, and productive individuals within the field of brain imaging and data science, and his group at Stanford University is internationally recognized as one of the best groups within functional brain imaging that addresses the “reproducibility crisis” in science by advocating for good research practices such as data sharing, reproducible data analysis and open science. His group has been at the forefront of developing standards for the organization and sharing of large datasets that can facilitate mega-analyses across research centers and hospitals, ensuring robust and generalizable scientific findings. He has authored a widely used Handbook for fMRI Data Analysis, and three books for broad audiences, including “The New Mind Readers” that explains the power and limitations of neuroimaging for non-experts. Poldrack has also worked to bring good research practices to scientists more broadly. He founded the Center for Open and Reproducible Science at Stanford (CORES) within the Stanford Data Science Center, whose mission is to develop and nurture transparency and reproducibility in the collection, analysis, and dissemination of data across all domains of scientific activity. He has also written a widely-used introductory statistics book (“Statistical Thinking”) that includes an entire chapter on doing reproducible research.
RH-News about the award: https://www.rigshospitalet.dk/english/news-and-media/news/Pages/2024/November/pioneer-in-open-science-receives-prestigious-danish-award.aspx
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Congratulations to Stinne Høgh who has received a travel grant of DKK 5,918 from Jordemoderforeningen for her participation at ECNP 2024 in Milan.
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Congratulations to Silvia Bruzzone for receiving DKK 62,000 for the project 'Fostering women's mental health by identifying markers of estrogen sensitivity to depressive episodes' and to Vibe Frøkjær for receiving 46.000 DKK for the project 'The brain basis of perinatal maternal hedonic health'.
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Congratulations to Prof. Vibe G. Frøkjær for receiving another scholarstipend worth 164.000 DKK from the Danish Society of Psychiatry/The Lundbeck Foundation. This time for medical student Mathilde Rasmussen who will work on the project 'Is maternal mental health status and brain serotonin markers in late pregnancy associated with placenta weight? A study on antenatal maternal factor’s effect on infant development'. The project will be conducted in the period Jun 1, 2024 to May 31, 2025.
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The ECNP Networks Board has announced that the ECNP Thematic Working Group (TWG) on Psychedelics has been formally approved to become a new ECNP Network. Gitte Moos Knudsen will be chair of the Network, and Johan Lundberg from Karolinska will be co-chair.
Networks are financially supported by ECNP, initially for a three-year duration, after which the Board will decide if ECNP will continue to support the Network. If the extension is approved, the Network continues to receive support and is yearly evaluated by the Networks Board.
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Congratulations to Patrick Fisher for receiving a Lundbeck Foundation Investigators Network starting grant worth 150.000 DKK for the 1-year project 'PsilocyDyn: Acute psilocybin effects on brain multiscale time-varying functional connectivity'.
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Congratulations to Prof. Martin Balslev Jørgensen for receiving a scholarstipend worth 144.000 DKK from the Danish Society of Psychiatry/The Lundbeck Foundation for medical student Randi Thorbøll Kjær to work on the project 'The role of parental bonding in shaping the adult serotonergic brain architecture in healthy individuals and in depression' with Dr. Kristian Reveles Jensen as part of the BrainDrugs-Depression project.
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- Travel support from the Lundbeck Foundation
- Postdoctoral fellowship in the BRIDGE – Translational Excellence Programme
- 1-year introduction stipend from RH to Martin Prener
- AFSP early career award to Anjali Sankar
- Travel support from Rigshospitalet's Jubilæumsfond
- Two scholarstipends from Danish Society of Psychiatry
- Lundbeck Foundation postdoc fellowship
- Lundbeck Early-Career Clinician Scientist 2024
- Post doc grant from Rigshospitalet
- ECNP Excellence Award to Annette Johansen