Garvey Institute for Brain Health Solutions funds 11 ideas

Eleven ideas to significantly help brain health were selected for funding by the UW Medicine Garvey Institute for Brain Health Solutions. A $1 million award will be divided among the recipient projects.

The institute was founded last October with a $50 million donation by local philanthropists Lynn and Mike Garvey, with a goal to enhance diagnostic capabilities and develop fast-track treatments for patients.

The awards went to UW faculty-led teams representing four schools, 13 departments, and numerous centers and collaborators. They included the VA Puget Sound Healthcare System, Harborview Medical Center, UW Medical Center, the Memory and Brain Wellness Center, the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, and the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute. Thirty-one applicants applied.

The winning awards touch on all three of the institute’s initial areas of focus: cognitive aging, trauma, and addictions.

“The proposals we received in this first round of funding are truly exciting,” said Jürgen Unützer, director of the Garvey Institute and UW professor and chair of the department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. “We funded a diverse group of teams and topics, from transformational new ideas to proven methods that can reach and help new populations and conditions. We believe that each of these projects has strong potential to improve the lives of people experiencing mental-health and substance-use conditions in a relatively short amount of time.”

The winning ideas:

• Synthesizing position emission tomography (PET) data from MRI using deep learning
  Project lead: Hesamoddin Jahanian (Departments of Radiology, Bioengineering)
• Improving access to cognitive rehabilitation treatment following mild traumatic brain injury
  Project lead: Kathleen Pagulayan (Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, VA Puget Sound Healthcare System)
• Remote assessment of cognitive aging and mental health in older African Americans during COVID-19
  Project lead: Debby Tsuang (Departments of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Medical Genetics, Epidemiology; VA Puget Sound Healthcare System)
• Improving the health and effectiveness of  caregivers of people with Lewy Body Dementias
  Project leads: Oleg Zaslavsky and Annie Chen (Department of Biobehavioral Nursing and Health Informatics, Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education)
• Noninvasive tracking of intracranial pressure to improve care of traumatic brain injury
  Project lead: Robert Bonow (Department of Neurological Surgery)
• Improving resilience and recovery from traumatic events using the ECHO model
  Project leads: Kristen Lindgren, Michele Bedard-Gilligan (Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences)
• Understanding opioid prescription and use following traumatic brain injury.
  Project lead: Amy Starosta (Department of Rehabilitation Medicine)
• Improving opioid-use disorder treatment using contingency management via mHealth
  Project leads: Mark Duncan, Kevin Hallgren, Matt Iles-Shih (Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences)
• Innovative training for suicide prevention in addiction treatment settings.
  Project lead: Richard Ries (Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences)
• Validating a non-invasive method to measure water transport in brain health and disease.
  Project leads: Jeff Iliff and Deidre Jansson (Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences; VA Puget Sound Healthcare System)
• Does the microbiome play a role in adverse outcomes following mTBI and PTSD?
  Project leads: Rebecca Hendrickson, Kathleen Pagulayan, Abigail Schindler (Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences; VA Puget Sound Healthcare System)

A full list of projects, collaborators and descriptions is available on the Garvey Institute for Brain Solutions.

– Bobbi Nodell, bnodell@uw.edu

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