Joshua Allen

University of Victoria

“The Antidepressant-Like Effects of Intravenous Reelin in a Preclinical Model Relevant for Depression”

Stratas is proud to announce Josh Allen as the winner of the Rahal Family Scholarship, valued at $1,500 and made possible by the generous support of Amine Rahal at Little Dragon Media. Josh is a doctoral student in the Neuroscience graduate program at the University of Victoria. He is the author of five original research articles, five review articles, and one book chapter. More on Josh’s Stratas-sponsored research can be found below:

Depression is the leading cause of disease burden for both sexes.

Unfortunately, first-line antidepressants only work in around 60% of patients and they require weeks to months of continuous treatment before therapeutic improvement is observed.

Therefore, there is a clear unmet need to develop mechanistically novel drugs to treat depression.

Reelin is a protein that regulates the growth of neurons and how they communicate with one another, and levels of reelin are lower in the brains and blood of patients with depression and in animals that are stressed.

Supplementing reelin can rapidly recover the behavioral and neurobiological consequences of stress in under a day.

This research opens the possibility of developing reelin-based compounds to treat depression.