FSU College of Medicine 2018 annual report 2018 Annual Report - FSU College of Medicine | Page 46

DISCOVERY
44
2018 RESEARCH HEADLINES
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Pradeep Bhide, the Jim and
Betty Ann Rodgers Eminent
Scholar Chair of Developmental
Neuroscience, and his team
produced findings suggesting
nicotine use among fathers
could cause cognitive deficits in
his children and grandchildren. Epigenetic changes
in key genes in the father s sperm are believed to
lead to such deficits. The results were published in
the open-access journal PLOS
Biology.
Bhide and colleagues Deirdre
McCarthy and Cynthia Vied
received a three-year National
Institutes of Health grant
to support additional work
on molecular mechanisms
underlying transgenerational
transmission of the effects of
paternal nicotine exposure.
Mohamed Kabbaj, professor in
the Department of Biomedical
Sciences, received a five-year,
million grant from the
National Institutes of Health
to study the safety of ketamine,
a potential depression therapy
some have called a wonder
drug. Hopefully, by the end of these five years
we ll have more information for psychiatrists to
decide whether ketamine can be safely prescribed
for suicidal patients and for patients who do not
respond to classic antidepressant treatment, said
Kabbaj.