The LIBR program catalyzed the formation of a “Quadrangle of Neuroscience Research”, which brought together researchers from Tulsa University (TU), Oklahoma University School of Community Medicine (OUSCM) and Oklahoma Medcial Research Foundation (OMRF), all of which have made commitments of individual and collaborative research activities, into a consortium arrangement. The studies undertaken by this consortium will facilitate the dissection of specific neuropsychiatric diseases and their related genetic or environmental influences that dictate responses to unique pharmacological or psychological therapies. The consortium already has active collaborative relationships with TU’s highly ranked Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, which also includes a new Institute of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (IBCB), and training relationships for graduate students and post-doctoral fellows with OUSCM, which is expanding as an academic medical center that will emphasize clinical neuroscience as an overarching research activity. Finally, OMRF has become an outstanding biomedical research institution capable of basic science studies of the complex molecular genetics of human disease and animal models of human disease, as well as studies related to drug-design, pharmacokinetics and targeted gene disruption.  

Understanding the human brain through neuroimaging is the life work of Wayne Drevets, MD, president and director of the Laureate Institute for Brain Research (LIBR). Together with Jerzy Bodurka, PhD, MRI facility director at LIBR, he hopes to transition use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in psychiatric applications from research to clinical practice, to more quickly and objectively diagnose patients and assess therapy.Prior to joining LIBR, Drs. Drevets and Bodurka worked at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), where they researched neuropsychiatry using fMRI to understand the brain’s response to stimuli and identify anatomic changes and cellular abnormalities. “Today, the field largely uses MRI to exclude a diagnosis that may masquerade as a psychiatric disorder,” says Dr. Drevets. He hopes to change this at LIBR with the installation of the Discovery MR750 3.0T system. Dr. Bodurka is equally optimistic. “Until now, commercially available 3.0T MRI scanners could not process in real time the large amount of data generated in a high resolution whole brain fMRI scan with multi-element coils array,” he says. “However, we believe that the Discovery MR750 might be the first 3.0T scanner to provide the level of power, speed and reliability we need for clinical applications in psychiatry.”