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DeNardo Lectureship speaker Dr. Kafui Dzirasa on editing brain circuits to prevent mental illness

The research of Kafui Dzirasa M.D. is complex and interdisciplinary, spanning the fields of engineering, neuroscience, medicine, and machine learning. But the motivation behind his work is as simple as it is personal: to help his family.

“A lot of my passion and my motivation for what I do is extraordinarily selfish,” said Dzirasa, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University. “[Helping them] is my anchoring motivation that has led me across all of these spaces.”

During a recent talk for ÌÇÐÄÆƽâ°æ’s Gerald and Sally DeNardo Lectureship—an endowed series established in 2008 to bring leading scientists to campus and inspire students pursuing health sciences—Dzirasa discussed his interdisciplinary research, which explores how genetic variants interact with environmental factors, like stress, to contribute to mental illness.

He recalled a conversation with his uncle, a fellow professor, who expressed appreciation for his research in psychiatry and neuroscience.

“He told me, ‘Mental illness has afflicted our family for multiple generations and if the entire point of all our suffering was to bring you into the world so you can come up with a treatment, it would have been worth it.’ I had this emotional moment, like this is why I do this,” Dzirasa explains.

Dzirasa explained how he is working to rebuild the brain circuits linked to psychiatric conditions like anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, and addiction, and find new ways to intervene before they fully develop.

“Years ago, I had this grand idea that instead of figuring out how to treat these illnesses, why don’t we figure out how to prevent them in the first place?” Dzirasa said.

Here are some key highlights from his talk:

On how he identifies appropriate interventions for different mental illnesses

“The idea is if we could target something central like stress, we could progress a lot of the different variabilities that happen across different health landscapes. It’s like thinking about treating blood pressure before you have a heart attack or stroke or lose your eyesight because you can hit that common thing. That is how we were thinking about getting ahead of mental illnesses and treating them.”

On the personal pressure he feels to find treatments for neuropsychiatric disorders 

“Often, I feel like I am not doing enough. But the truth is, I’m desperate to solve a problem that I feel like I’ve barely made headway in. It drives me to do things that I would otherwise see as risky and outside of the box.”

On stress as a predictive agent for mental illness

“One thing I came to appreciate when I started in the clinic as a resident was that a lot of times when my patients were coming in and getting admitted, they had this major stressful life event… that precipitated [their] first psychiatric illness, whether it was somebody who had experienced a major tension in their relationship or someone who lost a family member. I came to appreciate that stress was a precipitating factor. But not everybody in stress develops a mental illness. If we can think about stress, could we figure out who was vulnerable to stress and who wasn’t, and use that as our predictive agent? Could we separate the vulnerable and resilient and understand how the brain generates vulnerability?”

On his current research in editing brain circuits to prevent psychiatric disorders and his vision for treatment development

“We don’t want to turn off the brain’s ability to process stress, nor the brain’s ability to adapt in relation to stress. We just want to steer how that adaptation happens and deal with an amount of low stress.”

“I think there’s a lot of work to be done around involving the public in developing any intervention from the start, such that there’s more acceptance and adoption of it. There’s an entirely different public engagement component that I think needs to happen with developing this type of therapeutic intervention.”