Rebecca Price

Transforming care for treatment-resistant depression.

The emails — dozens of them — arrived in Rebecca Price’s inbox in an exhaustive flurry, all inquiring about her recent study on depression and ketamine. Typically, a new study stirs interest among what Price calls “the academic journal crowd,” but few others.

This one was different.

“When the study findings came out there was some press coverage and the word got out,” said Price, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh. “I've heard from patients, their family members and providers who want to be at the frontline of whatever's new and novel.”

Price’s study — in which a single dose of ketamine followed by a series of confidence-boosting computer exercises was shown to provide long-lasting relief to those with entrenched depression — is both.

While researchers have long touted the ability of intravenous ketamine to treat depression, it has practical barriers that prevent widespread use. Its results wane quickly — within a week or two — so treatment requires frequent, monitored infusions, and those infusions are often not covered by insurance.

To find a path around those barriers, Price revisited her computer science roots. She attended Stanford University as an undergrad, where she was in the symbolic systems program, a major that integrates knowledge from multiple disciplines, including computer science, linguistics and psychology. 

With those lessons in mind, Price developed simple computer exercises using positive words and smiling faces to boost the self-worth of patients. In her study, she found that completing the exercises after receiving a single dose of intravenous ketamine, when cognition is most malleable, prolonged the treatment’s antidepressant effects — for a full three months.

“So, pretty substantial relative to the week or two of relief you see from one ketamine infusion given in isolation,” Price said.

Price then began testing the computer exercises at UPMC Western Psychiatric Hospital with patients who have attempted suicide. It’s a real-world application that will help determine where the intervention may fit into the health care system.

“They're already in the highest risk category and getting the highest standard of psychiatric care the health care system has to offer them,” Price said. “Can we then add this new intervention, and does that create the buffer that we got in the first study?”

In addition to the study at Western Psych, Price is working with the Pitt Innovation Institute to explore the commercialization potential of her intervention. She recently joined the institute’s inaugural cohort of Pitt EI3 Fellows, which helps researchers pursue entrepreneurial efforts related to innovation.

Already, they’ve helped Price apply for a patent and connected her with a company that is sponsoring her to test the effectiveness of her computer exercises when paired with their novel, ketamine-like compound.

Those are avenues Price never considered, but ones that she hopes will get her intervention into the hands of people who will benefit from it most, like those whose emails flooded her inbox. Eventually, she envisions patients with varying psychological conditions choosing from a buffet of computer exercises to enhance their treatments. But that, she says, is still a distant dream.

“We hope these will become useful tools in clinical settings, but the research is still new,” Price said. “Meanwhile, we have strong, evidence-backed treatments for mental health conditions available, and I encourage folks to reach out for help. Talk to professionals about what those options look like and which ones might work best for them.”

Learn more about how the EI3 program is cultivating faculty talent and expanding access to entrepreneurial opportunities.

Photography by Tom Altany