Project Summary
The HDRF Strategic Plan aims to produce animal models that capture essential features of treatment resistant, relapsing depression in humans. Since no animal model is perfect, there is great value in using multiple animal models to capture the essential features of chronic depression. Key to this strategy is to identify the brain changes common across all the animal models. These shared changes would be deemed essential not incidental, and are most likely to be also present in the brains of severely depressed humans. Each of the HDRF projects will generate a huge amount of data. The HDRF Data Center is therefore critical in mining data from different sources to extract new knowledge about common changes that lead to depressive behavior, and to identify brain molecules that are likely to be responsible for treatment resistant depression.