New mood disorders program aims to advance treatments, erase stigma

A gift of $20 million from the Ray and Dagmar Dolby Family Fund to the Department of Psychiatry at UC San Francisco will support research on mood disorders, aiming to rapidly advance the understanding and treatment of depression, bipolar disorder and related illnesses.

The new gift will support pioneering UCSF research on the genetics, neurobiology and brain circuitry underlying these disorders, with the ultimate goal of discovering better therapies to improve the lives of patients and their families and, in turn, eliminating the stigma surrounding mental illness.

"This research is a critical step forward for the millions of people who suffer, seemingly invisibly, with diseases that are real and unfortunately underfunded," said Dagmar Dolby. "Our family is pleased to support UCSF as it advances this research to foster greater knowledge and understanding, and break down the stigma around mental illness."

According to the World Health Organization, depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide, affecting an estimated 350 million people of all ages. Progress in understanding, treating and preventing depression and bipolar disorder has been slow, however, and no truly new medications for these illnesses have been developed in decades.

The Dolby family's gift comes at an opportune time to help break this therapeutic logjam, said Matthew W. State, MD, PhD, chair and Oberndorf Family Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry at UCSF, as rapid progress in psychiatric genomics and neuroscience is occurring, while traditional barriers between medicine and psychiatry and across scientific disciplines erode.

"UCSF offers an ideal environment for making real progress on these debilitating disorders. The Department of Psychiatry is emerging as a full partner in a powerhouse basic and clinical neuroscience community at UCSF, and shedding the typical territoriality of psychiatry versus neurology versus neurosurgery," said State. "By leading the charge on the research side, we can make a tremendous difference in people's lives and at the same time transform how people think about mental illness, ending the destructive stigmatization and marginalization of our patients. Serious mental illnesses are not fundamentally different from heart disease, cancer or epilepsy—we just don't understand them well enough yet."

The new gift will create an endowment for recruiting two senior distinguished professors with expertise in mood disorders, and will provide support for world-class junior faculty with a special interest in these illnesses. In addition, the donation will support clinical research and treatment programs, many of which will be carried out at a new UCSF mental health center at Mission Bay, announced earlier this year and slated to open in the spring of 2019.

With this new building and a number of important collaborations underway, State said UCSF is particularly well positioned to leverage this new gift to benefit patients and their families. The gift will also support new collaborative research projects between the Department of Psychiatry, the UCSF Memory and Aging Center (MAC), and the Kavli Institute for Fundamental Neuroscience (Kavli IFN), which was established with a joint $20 million commitment from UCSF and the Kavli Foundation in Oct., 2015.

Provided by University of California, San Francisco