Eduardo Gascon Gonzalo
Resercher and team leader of the SONIC team (Social Cognition and Connectomics) at INT.
Combining experimental models to investigate the pathogenic mechanisms of depression
Depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide and its incidence dramatically increased after the COVID pandemic. It is firmly established that both genetic and environmental factors contribute to disease pathogenesis. Unraveling the relative contribution of these factors and identifying the molecular mechanisms operating in the disease represent therefore a major challenge in biological psychiatry. In the team, we are focusing on microRNAs, a class of short non-coding RNAs consistently implicated in the crosstalk between genetics and environment. To obtain mechanistic insights and establishing causal links it is essential to break down disease complexity and to concentrate on precise features of depression. For that, we are combining a number of experimental models (from rodents to primates) and approaches (from cell biology to genetics). Our findings point out the relevance of precise brain regions in depression and suggest the existence of shared molecular pathways whose disruption is critical for disease pathogenesis. Our ongoing work aims at defining the precise neural circuits (neuronal and/or glial) altered in depression at the single-cell resolution.
