Mentorship and Research in Bipolar and Substance Use Disorders

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Dr. James J. Prisciandaro is a licensed Clinical Psychologist, Associate Professor in the Addiction Sciences Division of the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC), who is committed to making a measurable impact on our understanding and ability to treat individuals with bipolar (BD) and/or substance use disorders (SUD) through his program of patient-oriented research (POR). Dr. Prisciandaro has served as PI, Co-PI, or Co-I on 12 NIH-funded grant awards since joining MUSC in 2009, but his success in designing and executing NIH-funded research studies has come at a significant cost: his efforts to mentor new clinical investigators have been greatly limited by his employment within an academic medical center that is not able to provide faculty with protected time for mentoring or professional development. As a result of this lack of support, Dr. Prisciandaro has had to greatly limit the number of new clinical investigators that he has been able to mentor, and he has not been able to expand his methodological skillset since completing his K23 training 5-years ago. The proposed K24 award would allow Dr. Prisciandaro to fulfil his career goals by providing him with the protected time and supplementary funding needed to comprehensively train significantly more new clinical investigators and to develop and expand his methodological skills in MRI and statistics to include genomics. Towards this end, Dr. Prisciandaro has recruited several consultants and collaborators to help him create, execute, and monitor a comprehensive training plan, including longstanding collaborators within his fields of expertise (Drs. Richard Edden [MRI] and Michaela Hoffman [biostatistics]) along with three new consultants/collaborators, Drs. Ananda Amstadter (psychiatric genomics), Stefano Berto (genomics and bioinformatics), and Zhewu Wang (psychiatric genetics). With their guidance, Dr. Prisciandaro has proposed a research strategy to apply cutting-edge genomics methods to blood samples that he has collected from every participant enrolled in each of his NIH-funded studies to date, starting with those from his K23 study; a 2*2 factorial (BD*alcohol use disorder [AUD]), multimodal-MRI investigation of neurochemical (i.e., GABA and glutamate levels) and neurobehavioral overlap (i.e., activation to alcohol cues and response inhibition) between BD and AUD. Dr. Prisciandaro will devote the remainder of his effort to his current NIH-funded program of POR, focused on pharmacologically-manipulating intermediate MRI phenotypes of BD and/or SUD, which is tightly aligned with his career goals and a rich source for mentee training and productivity. As these pharmaco-imaging studies complete participant enrollment, Dr. Prisciandaro and his consultants/collaborators will apply to their data the proposed genomics methods, extended to include genetic variants underlying the mechanisms of action of the medications under investigation (e.g., gabapentin). He will involve mentees in all aspects of his POR, including all proposed genomics research. Together, these combined efforts will significantly advance both Dr. Prisciandaro's POR career as well as our understanding of and ability to treat individuals with BD+SUD.