Department News
NIMH Awards G. Pandey $1.75 Million Grant

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) last week awarded a $1.75 million grant to Ghanshyam Pandey, Ph.D., to study protein kinase C and transcription factors in patients with mood disorders. The 5-year grant is a competitive renewal of a previous grant in which Dr. Pandey studied 5HT2A receptors and PKC. With the renewal grant Dr. Pandey will study PKC and MARCKS, a substrate for phosphorylation by PKC, as well as the role of transcription factors such as CREB and BDNF in the neurobiology of patients with mood disorders.

At the Eleventh World Congress of Psychiatry held last month in Yokohama, Japan, Dr. Pandey gave an invited presentation entitled "Lessons from Postmortem Studies: Alterations in Signal Transduction Mechanisms in Suicide Brain." He discussed work conducted on signal transduction mechanisms in understanding of the neurobiology of suicide and its relevance for more appropriate therapeutic interventions in patients with mood disorders and suicide.