The IOCDF is proud to announce the five winners of the 2024 Research Grant Awards, who received almost $700,000 in funding thanks to the grassroots support of our donors.
A record-breaking total of 98 proposals were submitted by research teams from almost 20 countries around the world. The five winning grants summarized below were selected through a highly competitive peer-review process involving a panel of 81 top researchers reviewing grants in their areas of expertise. The most highly rated projects in the first round were then subjected to a second round of scrutiny from the full committee.
This year also saw the first official Topic of Interest — “Increasing Access to Treatment for All.” Although evidence-based treatments such as ERP and medications are effective, they are currently not accessible to all people with OCD due to factors such as distance from providers, cost, misinformation, and stigma. Many people from underserved and minority communities face barriers to receiving effective and potentially life-saving treatments. We launched the Topic of Interest to receive proposals related to improving access to treatment for underserved and underrepresented groups (such as rural communities, people with lower socioeconomic status, and racial, ethnic, and sexual and gender minority groups). Proposals for other topics in OCD and related disorders were accepted as well.
Breakthrough Award
The goal of the five-year Breakthrough Award is to support innovative and potentially groundbreaking projects — high-impact science that could make a profound impact on the field and accelerate progress toward new and more effective treatments for OCD. This award was made possible through the generosity of the Selig Family.
Insights into the pathophysiology of obsessive compulsive disorder from single-cell analysis of the human brain
Primary Investigator: Steven McCarroll, PhD
Harvard Medical School (Boston, MA)
Award Amount: $500,000
Although neuroimaging has generated insights into which brain regions are thought to be affected in people with OCD, the underlying cellular and molecular changes are still unknown. Using brain tissue donated at the end of life by 50 people with OCD and controls, this study will identify specific cell populations and genes that are altered in people with OCD by analyzing hundreds of thousands of individual cells from three brain regions. These regions — the caudate nucleus, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and the anterior cingulate cortex — will be analyzed using novel technology that can identify which genes each individual cell is using, and recognize biological states and changes in these cells.
Data will be shared broadly to support the community of scientists studying OCD, enabling all researchers to query the data to answer questions about changes in specific genes and cell populations in OCD. This study will potentially deepen our understanding of the biology underlying OCD and generate new ideas for OCD medicines and therapies.
Michael A. Jenike Young Investigator Awards
Awardees are promising early-career researchers who are working to establish themselves in the field of OCD and related disorders. Four awardees with projects about increasing treatment access for Black Americans, investigating the genetics of OCD and tics, understanding ERP cognition, and training rural clinicians in ERP received funding from thousands of individual donors who contribute to the IOCDF Research Grant Fund every year.
Utilizing community-based approaches to increase treatment access for Black Americans with OCD: Evaluating the feasibility of The Black and Living with OCd (BLOC) Project, a culturally-informed web-based multimedia program
Principal Investigator: Ogechi Onyeka, PhD
Baylor College of Medicine (Houston, TX)
Award Amount: $49,959.00
Submitted for the 2024 Topic of Interest
Although both Black Americans and European Americans experience OCD at similar rates, OCD remains undertreated within the Black community. Several obstacles to treatment (i.e., ERP) have been identified such as treatment costs, limited awareness of treatment, and stigma. However, few studies have examined how to best address these challenges.
Online tools such as interactive educational websites with videos and vignettes may be a helpful approach in increasing treatment awareness and access to the specialized treatment required for OCD. This study aims to address these challenges by developing and evaluating a pilot, publicly available, culturally-sensitive online program for Black Americans with OCD called The Black and Living with OCd (BLOC) Project. This study will use community-based participatory approaches to directly engage Black American adults with OCD and clinicians treating minority populations to understand lived experiences and barriers to treatment, and develop and evaluate The BLOC Project for Black Americans with OCD.
Is tic-related OCD genetically different from OCD without tics?
Principal Investigator: Nora Strom
Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (Munich, Germany)
Award Amount: $49,649.52
Tourette syndrome (TS) is a neuropsychological disorder that is related to OCD, and is characterized by sudden, repetitive movements and/or sounds called tics. Some people with OCD also experience tics, leading to a condition known as tic-related OCD. This combination of symptoms presents unique challenges, as the distinction between OCD-related compulsions and tics can be difficult. People with tic-related OCD are usually younger when the symptoms start, present very specific OCD symptoms, and more men than women are affected.
People with tic-related OCD may experience unique challenges in treatment effectiveness compared to those with OCD or TS alone. What sets these individuals with tic-related OCD apart from those with only OCD or TS?
This study will explore if OCD with tics is different from OCD without tics in terms of genetics. Large sets of genetic data from people with OCD, TS or both disorders will be analyzed to find similarities and differences of genes in these groups. The aim is to explore whether there are specific genetic patterns for people with tic-related OCD compared to those with only OCD or TS. The study will also look at how these patterns relate to other conditions, like attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder or autism. By understanding these genetic differences, better ways to diagnose and personalize the treatment of OCD, TS, and their combination could be developed.
Who learns from OCD exposures? Investigating pessimistic learning rates and cognitive immunization during expectancy violation
Principal Investigator: Amelia Dev, MS
University of Miami (Miami, FL)
Award Amount: $49,320.00
Submitted for the 2024 Topic of Interest
Although exposure and response prevention (ERP) is the most effective psychological treatment for OCD, only half of patients will reach symptom remission after completing it. Understanding the mechanism behind ERP is important to figure out how to improve this treatment. One theory of how ERP helps people with OCD is through expectancy violation, the process in which an individual’s prediction (or expectation) is disproven, allowing them to change their beliefs. Current research suggests that people with OCD may have difficulty learning and changing their beliefs — they may be unable to learn from expectancy violation during ERP, preventing them from changing their obsessive beliefs and ultimately preventing symptom improvement. There is a major gap in existing research, as no studies have tested factors that could impact whether people with OCD successfully learn from ERP.
This study will test two factors which may impact how well ERP works for people with OCD: pessimistic learning and cognitive immunization. Pessimistic learning is when a person changes beliefs more readily in response to negative, rather than positive, feedback or outcomes. Cognitive immunization is when one interprets inconsistent evidence in a way that fits their expectations without altering their beliefs. Participants with OCD will complete an online ERP treatment, and we will collect real-time data from them during exposure exercises to measure their expectancies and the outcomes of their exposures. This data will be used to see if those who are more prone to pessimistic learning and cognitive immunization will not benefit as much from ERP. Several technological advancements, including artificial-intelligence-based natural language processing (NLP) techniques, will be used to analyze data more robustly. Results from this study will ultimately guide the creation of stronger therapies for OCD, and signpost the path for future research with NLP to provide powerful, real-time insights to patients and clinicians during ERP.
Co-delivered exposure with response prevention in Outback Australia: A novel training model to increase access to evidence-based care for OCD in rural settings
Principal Investigator: Katelyn Dyason, PhD
University of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia)
Award Amount: $47,856.40
Submitted for the 2024 Topic of Interest
Exposure and response prevention (ERP) is highly effective for treating children and adolescents with OCD, with up to 70% improving from treatment. Unfortunately, there is a well-documented lack of clinicians who provide high-quality ERP, leading to a treatment gap that is particularly felt in rural and remote areas. In Australia, there are no identified OCD specialists more than 100 kilometers from a metropolitan area.
Training and supporting more clinicians to address this access barrier is complex and challenging, and we do not know how much more is required to make this training effective. This study will develop and test a new method to train rural clinicians in ERP, where they observe an expert clinician from a metropolitan-based OCD speciality hub deliver ERP and then slowly transition to delivering this treatment themselves with supervision from the expert clinician. In this way, the expert clinician and rural clinician will “co-deliver” ERP to rural clients. The expert clinician will join the session via telehealth, and the rural clinician will be face-to-face with their rural client to assist with ERP tasks. Six rural clinicians will be trained and twelve rural young people with OCD will receive this co-delivered telehealth ERP. The goal of this co-delivery mode is to significantly improve clinicians’ knowledge about ERP, competency and confidence delivering it, increase intentions to implement ERP with future clients, and significantly decrease negative attitudes relating to ERP. Additionally, it is hoped that the co-delivered telehealth ERP will significantly reduce clients’ symptoms, functional impact, and family accommodation of OCD. The study will allow rural young people with OCD to receive specialist ERP treatment that would otherwise be inaccessible to them, and will hopefully result in rural clinicians who are trained and competent to continue delivering ERP, benefitting many future children and adolescents in their care. It will also improve our knowledge about effective ways to train clinicians to competency and increase access to evidence-based OCD treatment in routine clinical practice.
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