Unlocking Better, Faster Depression Treatments | Talia Lerner | One Scientist's Mind

Dr. Talia Lerner is uncovering how stress and dopamine interact in the brain and how that knowledge could lead to faster, more effective depression treatments. Her research focuses on adult stress, brain circuits, and why current medications may miss key biological factors like cortisol and developmental timing. Current depression medications can take a long time to work and patients sometimes have to take multiple to see desired results—Dr. Lerner's goal is to find faster acting drugs and ways to better match patients with medications that will respond as desired.

Depression – a mood disorder associated with deficits in reward processing – affects hundreds of millions of people worldwide and can be difficult to treat. Stress is a major risk factor for the development and exacerbation of depression, but despite this well-established connection, we have no depression treatment that targets the biological stress response. Failures of translation stem from the fact that we do not understand how stress hormones interact with brain circuits for reward processing.

2024 One Mind Rising Star Awardee Dr. Talia Lerner is studying this question, examining how glucocorticoids like cortisol – the body’s primary stress hormone – impact dopamine – a neurotransmitter well-known to regulate reward processing. She has found that glucocorticoids regulate dopamine differently in males and females. By understanding this sex difference and elucidating its relationship with depression, she hopes to provide crucial mechanistic neurobiological insights to support the development of new depression treatments and to ensure these treatments work for men and women.

Dr. Talia Lerner is an Associate Professor of Neuroscience and Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at Northwestern University, Feinberg School of Medicine, and the Associate Director of the Northwestern University Interdepartmental Neuroscience graduate program. Her lab studies the neural circuit basis of motivation, reward learning, and habit formation. She is interested in how individual variations in dopamine circuit function relate to differences in behavior and neuropsychiatric disease risk. Dr. Lerner earned her BS in Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry from Yale University and her PhD in Neuroscience from UCSF. She completed postdoctoral training at Stanford University.

Watch Dr. Talia Lerner's live presentation from the 2024 Science & Innovation Symposium at the 31st One Mind Music Festival:    • Understanding Stress Hormone Regulation of...  

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