School of Science Agenda
Date: 2024-09-11
Time: 12pm
Location: SA236
For online audiences: please join us with Tencent Meeting (ID:434-4785-928)
Speaker:Dr Lee Wei Lim
Topic:Deep Brain Stimulation: From Antidepressant to Memory Enhancement
Details
Depression and dementia pose some of the biggest threats to mental health worldwide, yet current available treatments face issues of therapeutic efficacy and high rates of treatment failure. To tackle these key research challenges, we applied deep brain stimulation (DBS) to alleviate depressive-like behaviors and memory impairment in animal models. We demonstrated that DBS of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) induced the most profound anxiolytic and antidepressant-like responses through a brain circuit involving the serotoninergic and dopaminergic mechanisms in the midbrain. We further investigated the effects of mPFC DBS on fear memories for the treatment of anxiety disorders. We found that mPFC DBS during the memory consolidation stage was a critical time point for disrupting fear memory involving hippocampal dopamine 2 receptors and specific neurotransmission. Of particular interest, we conducted the first study to show that mPFC DBS can improve learning and memory functions through a hippocampal neurogenesis mechanism, with distinct gene expression patterns involving both neurogenesis and non-neurogenesis mechanisms. Overall, our findings suggest that mPFC DBS could serve as a novel effective treatment targeting depression and dementia-related disorders.
Speaker
Dr Lee Wei Lim is currently an Associate Professor at the School of Science, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China. He was an Assistant Professor in the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, the University of Hong Kong. After completing his MD, master and PhD degrees, Dr Lim spent several years of research fellowships at Maastricht University, University of Oxford, and Nanyang Technological University. Dr Lim is honored to have been elected as a Life Member of the Academy of Medicine of Malaysia, a Life Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology, and an UNESCO Executive Committee Member of Anti-aging and Disease Prevention, France. Dr Lim’s research is currently focused on neuromodulation and psychopharmacological treatments for psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders. He has contributed extensively to the field of neuromodulation and neuropsychiatric research, with 133 published articles and his papers have been cited more than 4800 times with an H-index of 35 (Google Scholar).
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