Annie Kathuria
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Neuroscience
Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder together affect over 6% of people in the US and cause long-term disability. Yet most cases have no identifiable molecular cause.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Biomedical Engineering
Computer Science
- Topics
schizophrenia
bipolar disorder
psychiatric disorders
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2031
What they work on
- Build a longitudinal dataset of spontaneous and stimulated electrical activity, recorded with multi-electrode arrays, from 75 cerebral organoids grown from schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and control cells, from day 90 to day 270.
- Define reproducible profiles of circuit development and disease-linked firing patterns, such as spike rate, inter-spike interval and burst duration, in patient-derived brain organoids.
- Validate Neural Navigator, a pipeline combining stimulus-response network modeling, a sink–source index of information flow, MRMR feature selection and interpretable classifiers, to classify psychiatric conditions.
- Release all models, code and organoid recording datasets in FAIR-compliant formats to support future mechanism studies and drug screening.
More about the research
That makes it hard to sort patients into subgroups or design treatments that target the underlying problem. A key gap is the lack of tools to measure how brain circuits misbehave in human tissue at cellular resolution. Animal models lack human relevance. Brain imaging and postmortem tissue cannot capture the activity of individual cells as it changes. Cerebral organoids are tiny three-dimensional brain-like tissues grown from patients' own cells, and they offer a way in.
Why it matters
Treatments for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder work only partly, in part because there is no way to measure how each patient's brain cells communicate abnormally. A standardized organoid-based measurement could help sort patients with no known cause into meaningful groups. It could also provide quantitative endpoints for drug screening, which may speed the search for more effective treatments for patients and families.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Sowmya Yelamanchili
University of Nebraska Medical Center, NE·Neuroscience
Examine neuron function and damage to synapses and mitochondria caused by combined HIV infection and methamphetamine exposure in 3D cerebral organoids containing microglia, the brain's immune cells.
Sergiu Pasca
Stanford University, CA·Neuroscience
Generate and functionally characterize human stem cell-derived organoids that resemble the spinal cord floor plate, the midline structure that guides crossing axons.
Michael Stryker
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Neuroscience
Record large populations of neurons with multi-electrode arrays in the retina and visual cortex of awake, behaving mice while they view naturalistic visual flow and simpler artificial patterns.
The school
Johns Hopkins University: 100 labs on PI Pages, $4.1B a year on research, 622 research doctorates a year.
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