Gabriella Gobbi: Embracing psychiatry from bench to bedside

Summary

Adolescent cannabis exposure has been shown to increase vulnerability to depression, influencing public health policy in Quebec by raising the legal age for cannabis access and banning advertising. Dr. Gabriella Gobbi's research also includes developing novel melatonin receptor agonists for sleep and pain management, and studying the effects of psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin on anxiety and social behavior, with ongoing clinical studies to identify neurophysiological biomarkers.

Study at a glance

Abstract

This Genomic Press Interview features Dr. Gabriella Gobbi, Professor of Psychiatry at McGill University, Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Therapeutics for Mental Health, Staff Psychiatrist at the McGill University Health Center (MUHC), and Senior Scientist, Brain Repair and Integrative Neuroscience Program at the Research Institute of the MUHC. Trained in medicine and psychiatry at the Catholic University of Rome and in neuroscience at the University of Cagliari, she completed her postdoctoral fellowship at McGill in 2001 and has remained there for more than two decades. She was the first woman elected President of the Collegium Internationale of Neuropsychopharmacology (CINP) in the organization's 70-year history. Her research program operates across three interconnected translational domains. First, her laboratory established, in animal models and in human cohorts, that adolescent cannabis exposure increases vulnerability to depression, work that directly informed public health policy in Quebec, including raising the legal age of cannabis access and banning cannabis advertising. Second, in collaboration with medicinal chemists, her group discovered and patented novel selective agonists of the melatonin MT1 and MT2 receptors, elucidated the specific role of the MT2 receptor in restorative sleep and neuropathic pain, and is advancing a first-in-class MT2-selective partial agonist toward clinical development. Third, beginning in 2013, before the contemporary wave of clinical psychedelic trials, her laboratory characterized the anxiolytic and prosocial effects of LSD in preclinical models, identified underlying circuit-level and molecular mechanisms, including mTORC1 signaling, and is now extending this work to psilocybin, DMT, and 5-MeO-DMT while initiating clinical studies to identify objective neurophysiological biomarkers of psychedelic action in humans. The author of more than 150 peer-reviewed publications, 20 book chapters, and one book, and the holder of multiple international patents, Dr. Gobbi has received recognition including the Venezia Prize (2015), the Samarthji Lal Prize from the Graham Boeckh Foundation (2017), the McGill University Principal's Prize for Media Engagement (2019), the CINP Brain Research Award (2022), and the CCNP Award for Innovations in Neuropsychopharmacology (2022). She has testified as an expert witness before the Canadian Senate and the Ministries of Health and Justice in Québec on cannabis legislation. This Genomic Press Interview traces her intellectual formation from central Italy to Montreal, the bedside observations that generated her most consequential research questions, and her vision of a neuropsychopharmacology that remains simultaneously mechanistic, translational, and in the direct service of patients.

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