Dr. Casey Halpern

So there's actually a lot of interest in using that procedure to study mental health disorders.

We are trying to do it for patients with obsessive compulsive disorder.

We're awaiting an FDA decision on that.

But actually I credit our colleagues at Baylor and at UCSF for studying this already, bringing together the epilepsy technique and the psychiatry expertise to study how we could better target electrodes in depression.

And I'll tell you, if they have a consistent target

perhaps there becomes an ultrasound target.

But right now the approach is a bit more reversible because you can always shut that electrode off or even remove the electrode if perhaps it's not in the optimal location to treat the depression.

but actually after a large volume of cases, perhaps they could pool that data to develop a new ultrasound target for depression.

I think that would be fabulous and probably is their long-term goal, not to speak for them, but that would be something that I'm sure is on their radar.

You might ask, well, why aren't you doing this for obesity right now in our study?

And the reason is that we've developed a target for obesity and binge eating disorder developed out of mice that we believe is relevant for the human state because you can model this problem in a mouse a bit better than you can model depression or OCD.

So we feel like we can rely on the preclinical studies more.

Whereas with these perhaps more, I don't want to say more complicated, but more human mental health conditions that are hard to model in a mouse, you really have to study it in the human.

And you can perhaps start in an epileptic patient, a patient that has electrodes and try to provoke a depressed state or study epileptics that have comorbid depression, for example.

And that can really validate this approach as well.

But in the end, it's getting into the human brain that we need to do in the disease specifically that will eventually lead to a non-invasive approach, either a lesion or a modulatory approach.

Modulatory would be like TMS or lesion approach would be with ultrasound.

Yes.

I've always thought that if we can improve awareness, we can improve outcomes.

I think that's probably true for many of these patients.