In the News
Assistant professor of neuroscience Kay M Tye has studied the brain circuits underlying addiction, anxiety and depression, all major problems to the health of individuals and society. Now she wants to apply her training and the innovative techniques she has developed to obesity. “Obesity is linked to the neural circuitry of the other behaviors but it may be the most pressing problem because it is the most prevalent and it is increasing,” she says. “Our currently available treatments for obesity are ineffective and completely insufficient for the problem that faces our society.”
So Tye proposed a strategy to discover the neural circuits underlying obesity and then reprogram them to eliminate obsessive craving and consumption. The proposal was bold, creative and risky – just the kind of high-stakes project the NIH seeks to support with the Director’s New Innovator Award. Her gamble paid off. Tye has been named a New Innovator for 2013 and will receive $1.5 million over the course of five years. The award is designed specifically to support unusually creative new investigators with highly innovative research ideas at an early stage of their career when they may lack the preliminary data required for traditional funding mechanisms.
“It’s a huge honor to be recognized as a new innovator by this amazing NIH program and to be associated with all the other people who have won the award this year and in the past. Now I have a chance to make my vision a reality and to make a dramatic difference in obesity research.”
Tye joined the Picower Institute in January 2012 and by August 2013 published a paper in Neuron reporting the discovery of minute sub-circuits among the two well-studied brain regions involved in anxiety, the basolateral amygdala and the ventral hippocampus, based on work conducted in her new lab. Her obesity project will build on the methods she used to drill down to unprecedented detail in the circuitry and also her graduate school training with animal models of addiction, which she conducted at University of California, San Francisco.