Dr Christopher Heath

This will be a one-day symposium aimed at sarcoma (clinical specialists and researchers). Attendance will be in person (encouraged) or on-line (via Teams). We will aim to obtain CPD accreditation, as per other symposia organised by our group.

Major obstacles to the effective exploration of mood-related processes in neuropsychiatric illness include the lack of animal models that comprehensively recapitulate human presentation, the limited number of assessment tools to evaluate affective state in non-human species and, where such tools do exist, the lack of similarity between them and the methods used in the clinic or in human research. However, recent research has suggested that commonality in a construct referred to as ‘Cognitive Affective Bias’ (CAB) exists between species and behavioural tasks for assessing it have been developed and used as new approach for antidepressant screening in rodents. The basis of CAB concerns the way a subject interprets ambiguous/uncertain stimuli in their environment given their overall affective state. For example, people with anxiety or scoring high in the personality trait neuroticism show pessimistic cognitive bias when presented with ambiguous situations or stimuli (e.g. neutral faces). The identification of population with maladaptive cognitive biases is relevant since have shown to be central to the development and maintenance of depression. On the contrary, optimistic cognitive biases contributes to resilience to depression in humans and correlate with high motivation in both humans and animals. The study of CAB in animals could be used not only as a behavioural platform for antidepressant testing, also to identify individual pessimistic or optimistic-like tendencies, how they correlate with other behaviours and how they are regulated by different neurobiological substrates. The study of individual differences on CABs together with the assessment of other relevant behaviours would also contribute to characterise behavioural phenotypes which may be related with differences on sensitivity to manipulations known by inducing depression-like behaviour. In our lab we developed a touchscreen-based cognitive bias in mice which demonstrated to be sensitive to antidepressant and pro-depressant manipulations and which is currently being forward-translated to humans thanks to the translational potential of touchscreen devises. The present project aims 1) to study individual differences on CAB in mice and explore potential correlations with other relevant behaviours which have shown to correlate with pessimistic or optimistic biases in humans, such us motivation and anxiety, 2) if necessary, to optimise our CAB task to maximise individual differences to stablish a clear “cut off” to classify two types of populations (i.e. ‘optimistic’ vs. ‘pessimistic’ animals) and 3) to study patterns of neuronal activation by cFos in different brain areas known by being involved in the processing of affective information in both populations of mice. The results from this project will contribute to identify the target brain areas for the future analysis of specific mechanisms underlying vulnerability to depression as well as to optimise a touchscreen-based platform for the study of vulnerability to depression with a high translational potential.

£10k for consumables from King's College London, collaboration with Dr Ellie Dommett. For Morgane Colom's studentship.

Self-administration models of addiction typically require animals to make the same response over and over to procure and take drugs. By their design, such procedures often produce behaviour controlled by habits. This has supported the notion of addiction as a “drug habit”, and has led to considerable advances in understanding the neurobiological basis of such behaviour. While drug-taking involves habitual behaviours, the initial procurement of drugs may require considerable flexibility in seeking behaviour which, by definition, is not habitual. The proposed studies model this pattern of flexible reward-seeking and rigid reward-taking, requiring mice to solve a new puzzle every day to gain access to reward. Across weeks of observation, we will use photometry to watch real-time neuronal activity in the brain while rats seek and take reward. These biopsychological experiments provide the foundation for work in our new laboratory, which we hope will impact how people view and treat addictions.

The focus of this project is to develop and validate a series of non-invasive behavioural assessments for laboratory rodents that will enable routine evaluation of motivation and affective state. These assays will be designed with a lower severity band (refinement) and require fewer animals (reduction) than current methods.