Andrius Baskys, MD, PhD

Interviewed Fall 2002

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Dr Baskys is a geriatric psychiatrist at the VA Medical Center in Long Beach and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at U.C., Irvine. He did his psychiatry residency at the University of Toronto and continued his training at the McMaster University as a fellow in geriatric Psychiatry. Dr Baskys has studied neuroplasticity in such prestigious institutions as University College, London, Brain Institute, Moscow, University of Toronto and UCSF. He is a recipient of the Alzheimer's research scholarship award and Medical Council of Canada award.

Dr Baskys authored or co-authored three books on psychopharmacology and over 90 publications, presentations and reports. He is a Director of the Memory disorders program at the Long Beach VA and a co-director of the inpatient Psychogeriatric unit and runs the Molecular physiology laboratory. His research interests include pathophysiology and treatment of psychosis in patients with neurodegenerative disorders and Lewy body dementia. His laboratory is engaged in studies of molecular mechanisms of neuroprotection.

You have an MD and a PhD. Why did you choose to get both?

I became interested in research while in medical school. My first research assignment was investigating visual information processing in cats. It soon became evident that without understanding the mechanisms of memory, it is not possible to understand how the cat sees the world. I began to study memory, specifically, synaptic plasticity and long-term potentiation in the hippocampus, the key brain structure involved in short-term memory storage. This led to studies of the neurotransmitters, serotonin and glutamate, which are used in the hippocampus. Now, I am focused on studying the mechanisms of action of these neurotransmitters with the aim of developing and evaluating drugs that would treat such diseases as Alzheimer's, psychosis, and schizophrenia.

In what ways does this combination of clinical training in psychiatry and research training in neuroscience influence your work?

Psychiatry is a science that has many interesting questions to tackle for a probing mind. One of them is the question of how nerve cell death and survival contribute to psychiatric symptoms, such as memory loss and hallucinations, commonly encountered in patients suffering from Alzheimer's or Lewy body disease. There is no treatment for these conditions, but some of the drugs psychiatrists use can make symptoms better. We take these drugs to the laboratory and study how they affect nerve cell function and survival. We use animal models of these diseases to conduct experiments that should provide us with a better understanding of how these psychiatric drugs work. The more we know about how drugs work, the more likely we are to develop new drugs that improve nerve cell survival and consequently, further reduce the troubling symptoms that people experience.

How do you think the study of cellular/molecular neurobiology and genomics will affect the our understanding of psychiatric disorders and their treatment?

In theory, advances in molecular biology techniques and genomics could help researchers cure most diseases, including mental illnesses. In reality, we are far from this goal. One huge obstacle in understanding the causes and cures of many diseases is the process by which efficacious drugs get from the laboratory to the clinics. The path between discovery in the laboratory and clinical use of a drug is long, extremely costly and not always straightforward. Finding ways to streamline this process should be a priority, and many researchers are involved in developing ways to improve the translation of important findings from basic research to effective treatments.