UC San Francisco Receives $ 20 Million Donation from Dolby for Depression and Research Center

Could the depression be mitigated by fixing the defective electrical circuits of the brain?

A donation of $ 20 million from the family of audio pioneer Ray Dolby to the University of San Francisco will help find a solution through research at the new Dolby Family Center for Mood Disorders.

Medications and other therapies can help many millions of Americans who live with depression. But some people have severe symptoms that are out of reach of current remedies.

The donation, announced Tuesday, builds on the Dolby family's investment in 2015 in UCSF mood disorder research. Ray Dolby's wife, Dagmar, and her son David have also donated $ 21 million for Alzheimer's support at the California Pacific Medical Center, where Ray has received care in his last days.

Dolby grew up in Redwood City and graduated in 1951 at Sequoia High School, where he was a projection student. He worked at Ampex Corp. while obtaining a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He continued to invent the Dolby audio system and helped develop the VCR, founded the San Francisco-based Dolby Labs in 1976. His influence also spread to the cinema. The family lived in Pacific Heights.

"This is an extremely generous gift that is changing the game for research on mood disorders," said Dr. Andrew Krystal, vice-president of research at the Department of Psychiatry at UCSF.

"Depression is a problem that affects people's lives in an omnipresent way," he said. "When it's severe, it leaves people essentially non-functional."

The goal of our new research is to develop a new, personalized approach to treating major depression that involves identifying circuit dysfunction in the brain and then directly targeting the treatment, Krystal said.

There has been a lot of recent research on the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalograms (EEG) to identify areas of the brain that appear to be involved in the regulation of the brain. mood.

UCSF wants to launch an unprecedented clinical trial in 2019, which studies the circuits that connect brain regions that seem important to its functioning – and that play a role in depression.

A complex network of electrodes will be implanted surgically on the surface of the patient's brain, which will allow Krystal and his team to determine which circuits are involved in the mood and whether the electrical stimulation of these circuits could help relieve the spirits .

Other teams have reported that stimulation can improve symptoms of disorders such as epilepsy and obsessive-compulsive disorder, with some success.

During the treatment, the mood of the patients improved. This led to testing brain stimulation for depression.

"It's unique, because you measure and treat something by specifically targeting a dysfunctional circuit, when you need it, rather than treating everything, all the time," Krystal said.

"The Dolby gift supports what we have learned about this circuit malfunction," he said. "We can identify the circuits in each individual and then target the electrical treatment to fix the circuit malfunction."

This is an innovative and very expensive approach because different brain regions can be involved in different people – but this is now possible with Dolby funding.

The team also aims to identify specific brain biomarkers – reflecting the activity of inflammatory, neurotransmitter, neurotrophic, neuroendocrine, and metabolic systems – to aid the diagnosis and treatment of depression, anxiety, and other mood disorders.

Over the past two years, support from the Dolby family has allowed Krystal to develop a research program to test the hypothesis that mood disorders may be the first manifestation of dementia. of dementia, he or she can eventually develop, according to UCSF. This work has the potential to improve care and improve understanding of changes in brain circuit function that seem related to mood disorders.