Revathy Chottekalapanda, an Indian American assistant professor of neuroscience in psychiatry and three other Weill Cornell Medicine investigators have received Ritu Banga Impact in Healthcare Research Awards.
Endowed through a $5 million gift from Board of Fellows member Ritu Banga and her husband, Ajay Banga, each $50,000 award supports outstanding research aimed at closing knowledge gaps in clinical care to equalize outcomes across different populations, according to a Weill Cornell news release.
Dr. Florencia Marcucci, associate dean for research at Weill Cornell Medicine thanked the Bangas “for their vision in supporting groundbreaking research that challenges one-size-fits all treatment paradigms, and has the potential to transform patient care.”
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Chottekalapanda earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in science from Bangalore and Mysore universities in India and her PhD from Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, Germany before coming to the U.S.
She won the award for her project titled, “Patient-Specific Cellular Models of Depression and Treatment Response.” Brain-imaging studies show that communication between different brain regions is often altered in people with depression, yet it remains unclear how these changes relate to the behavior of individual brain cells.
Antidepressant medications also do not work for everyone, and responses vary widely from person to person, suggesting that biological differences between individuals play an important role. To better understand these differences, Dr. Chottekalapanda and her team developed a patient-specific cellular model of depression using a noninvasive approach.
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Blood samples donated by individuals with depression are used to generate stem cells, which are then converted into neurons like those found in the human brain. This allows the investigators to study how patient-derived neurons from different patients behave, communicate and respond to stress and antidepressant medications in a controlled laboratory setting.
One key strength of this approach is that each participant is carefully characterized using brain imaging, clinical symptoms, family history and past treatment responses. By combining these data with measurements from patient-derived neurons, the team can link brain-level changes seen in imaging to underlying cellular processes.
Ultimately, Chottekalapanda‘s research aims to explain the biological basis of depression and help predict which treatments will work best for each individual, supporting the development of more personalized and effective therapies, according to the release.