Precision psychiatry: Patient observation-initiated reverse-translational mechanistic investigation for psychotic disorders

Speaker: Akira Sawa

Host: Benedict Wendel

Akira Sawa is a psychiatrist and physician scientist in psychiatry. He is currently Director and Innovation Chair at Johns Hopkins Schizophrenia Center in Maryland, USA. He is focused on clinical and translational research in psychiatry and neuroscience, which includes close communications with patients and caregivers. Based on his training in both clinical psychiatry and basic molecular neuroscience, his research program with multiple collaborators aims to conduct translational studies for major mental illnesses, such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, with an emphasis on early detection and early intervention by addressing disease mechanisms.

His lab looks for key questions of research from clinical observations of patients. Accordingly, they have built and are expanding clinical cohorts of psychotic disorders with three dimensions of information (clinical/neuropsychological, brain imaging, and molecular/cellular). These include the resources and data from biopsied olfactory neuronal cells, the only accessible neuronal tissues with negligible invasion from living human subjects. Through the investigations of the clinical cohorts in the past decade, they have discovered several key molecular alterations in conjunction with specific neurocircuits in distinct subsets of patients with psychosis. These changes have supported the notion that psychotic disorders are systemic, highlighting the significance of the body-brain axis in the pathophysiology. In his presentation, Akira Sawa will focus on 2-3 topics from his lab's discoveries throughout the past decade and will provide their vision within the framework of precision psychiatry.