Professor Brian Dean
HND Appl.Biol., MSc., PhD, FRSB, CI Biol.

Professor Brian Dean is biochemist committed to understanding the causes and improving the treatment of schizophrenia, major depressive disorders and bipolar disorder. Professor Dean’s research to understand the breakdown in biochemical homeostasis underlying psychiatric disorders is holistic in that it utilises molecular neuroimaging, postmortem brain tissue, blood, animal models and cellular models.  In using such an approach Professor Dean has been able to show that abnormalities in cholinergic neurotransmission, neurodevelopment and neuroinflammation have critical roles in the generation of the symptoms associated with schizophrenia, major depressive disorders and bipolar disorder. Some of my research is now moving into the clinic, particularly focusing on developing blood-based diagnostic tests for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Professor Dean’s current research focuses are:

• Develop blood tests to aid in the clinical management of subjects with psychiatric disorders at the level of diagnostics, theranostics and clinical course.
• Using high-throughput screening of the transcriptome and proteome to gain an increased understanding of the causes of psychiatric disorders as a first step in identifying new drug targets that can be used to control the symptoms of people with psychiatric disorders.
• Combining genetics, epigenetics, gene expression and neuroimaging to better understand how genes and the environment can affect brain function to cause the changes in function that brings about the symptoms of psychiatric disorders.

Key collaborators:

• Richard Kannan – University of Melbourne Department of Psychiatry
• Christopher Rowe – Austin Hospital
• Susan Rossell – Swinburne University
• Jeremy Crook – Wollongong University
• Caroline Gurvich – Monash University
• Elisabeth Binder – Max Planck Institute, Munich
• Nikola Müller – Max Planck Institute, Munich
• Natalie Matosin – Wollongong University
• Takeo Yoshikawa – The RIKEN, Tokyo
• Atsushi Takata – The RIKEN, Tokyo
• James Duce – Alzheimer’s Research UK Drug Discovery Institute, Cambridge
• Edwin van den Oord – Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond
• Karolina Aberg – Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond
• Jeff Conn – Vanderbilt University
• Konstantin Khodosevich – University of Copenhagen