Philip Corlett, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine, is the recipient of a 2013 Janssen / International Mental Health Research Organization Rising Star Translational Research Award.
Dr. Corlett's project, "Potassium Channels and Prediction Error: Targeting Schizophrenia with Retigabine," was chosen to receive one of two honors, which is accompanied by funding.
Winners of the award are leaders of an independent research program and have a track record in a scientific field that can be applied to the study of the underlying mechanisms of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or major depression.
Dr. Corlett will use his Rising Star Award funds to enact a pilot study of retigabine treatment with a cohort of human volunteers with schizophrenia who have not been helped by traditional antipsychotic therapy.
Retigabine is FDA approved to treat epilepsy. The drug opens voltage gated potassium channels involved in the upstream regulation of dopamine neuron activity. This mechanism may represent a new approach to influence how patients with schizophrenia learn about and engage with their world.
Dr. Corlett will test his hypothesis that retigabine may help with both the positive (hallucinations and delusions) and negative (anhedonia and amotivation) symptoms of schizophrenia by observing patients’ brain activity during tasks that involve reinforcement learning and inference using functional MRI before and after treatment with the drug. He aims to understand why this treatment might help some patients better than others, with the goal of enabling more personalized approaches to schizophrenia therapy.
Dr. Corlett trained in experimental psychology, cognitive neuroscience and psychiatry at the University of Cambridge where he completed his PhD on the brain bases of delusion formation. Following a brief postdoc, he was awarded the University of Cambridge Parke Davis Exchange Fellowship in Biomedical Sciences, which brought him to the Yale. He joined the Yale Department of Psychiatry faculty in 2011.