Professor of Behavioral Neuroscience I Founder of @moghaddamlab | author of KETAMINE mitpress.mit.edu/97802625422…
Tehran/KU/Yale/Pitt/OHSU
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Truly an honor to give the NIH Director’s WALS lecture today especially as the last speaker under the leadership of @NIHDirector Dr Monica Bertagnolli
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Bita Moghaddam بيتا مقدم retweeted
This morning my friend Karl won a Nobel Prize and I solved Wordle in three guesses. Historians will argue which is the greater achievement, but I think he's probably going to edge me out.
med.stanford.edu/news/all-ne…
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Recommend this review especially since we have actual data now to support (or refute!) some of the theories here on how psychedelics may influence reward learning and behavioral flexibility
biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…
Serotonin biology as a basis for explaining psychedelic drug action - we learned a lot writing this review for @CurrentBiology
cell.com/current-biology/ful…
We know a good deal about serotonin, which should teach us how psychedelics work. But what’s the same? What’s different? 🤔
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Amazing recognition for this remarkable discovery that has fueled modern neuroscience. Congratulations to all!!
BREAKING NEWS
The 2026 #NobelPrize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel “for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics.”
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Developmental changes in GRIN2A expression may help explain the timing of psychosis in #Schizophrenia and support stage-specific and genetically informed treatment approaches. ja.ma/4ying06
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Please check out my futuristic opinion piece in
@JAMAPsych
"specific treatments for schizophrenia that are tailored to target symptoms at different developmental stages are no longer the stuff of science fiction, but instead are realistic future goals"
jamanetwork.com/journals/jam…
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And I was not just theorizing: the ideas are supported by several recent preclinical papers including this from the lab
nature.com/articles/s41380-0…
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Bita Moghaddam بيتا مقدم retweeted
Outstanding choice Orexin FTW!!
Long, long , long overdue.
🏆 Congratulations to this year’s #LaskerAward winners!
Basic: Emmanuel Mignot & Masashi Yanagisawa
Clinical: Kunihiro Hattori, Tomoyuki Igawa & Takehisa Kitazawa
Public Service: Michael J. Fox
Laskerfoundation.org
#Lasker2026 #LaskerLaureate
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Bita Moghaddam بيتا مقدم retweeted
Excited to share our new paper in Psychopharmacology: A pilot study comparing high-dose oral Δ9-THC, psilocybin, and placebo under the same set and setting used in psychedelic clinical trials.
@JHPsychedelics 🧵
link.springer.com/article/10…
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It is indeed important to consider the 60's &70's papers that showed adverse effects of unsupervised LSD use (e.g. sciencedirect.com/science/ar… ) However, if there was adequate clinical supervision, the incidence of such reactions were super low (e.g. Malleson, Br J Psychiat 118:229)
Psychedelics have sordid history in psychiatry. By mid 1960’s, LSD, psilocybin production for ”therapeutic purposes” was halted because of adverse events. Only when intense sessions pre-, during, post-drug dosing were used and most volunteers excluded, did safety margin improve.
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Enjoyed giving this talk on the effects of psilocybin and aversive learning. Some of the new data should be ready for preprint soon
Session 4 explored the system-level integration of weighing reward and punishment, featuring fascinating talks from Drs. Moghaddam, Baunez, Carnicella, and Granwald.
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We have suspected for a long while that ketamine stimulates opioid receptors but good to see solid evidence that it directly binds to both mu and kappa opioid receptors
⬇️ Nice summary piece on the topic by @mikelides and Jordi Bonaventura
The long-standing view that ketamine is simply an NMDA receptor antagonist has been progressively and fundamentally reshaped by a series of recent studies that have collectively redefined our understanding of how ketamine and its enantiomers act therapeutically but also why it produces reinforcement and has liability for misuse and addiction.
Excited to share this News & Views (rdcu.be/fBIc8) written with @jorgh82 and published yesterday in @NatureSMB on the recent work of Qianru Jiang, Tao Che and colleagues who showed that ketamine (as well as PCP) can bind directly within the orthosteric pockets of both mu and kappa opioid receptors.
The Jiang et al. findings, taken together with other recent studies support a bifunctional model in which NMDA and opioid receptor signaling may work together to shape ketamine's antidepressant, analgesic, dissociative, and reinforcing effects.
Understanding how these systems converge could inform the development of next-generation treatments that preserve therapeutic benefits while reducing the risks of misuse and adverse effects.
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Nice summary of work published today by my colleagues at @OHSUNews by folks at @NPR
A real-world study of Oregon's nonmedical psilocybin program shows promise
npr.org/2026/08/19/nx-s1-593…
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Bita Moghaddam بيتا مقدم retweeted
Of note, all these trials use clozapine and likely sub-threshold doses, as the DREADD agonist which we first proposed for human applications in 2017 when we showed that converted clozapine activates CNS DREADDs in vivo. Using clozapine addresses the drug component but other obstacles like delivery, transduction, longitudinal expression, target engagement, etc. remain. Accounting for and addressing patient heterogeneity in disease makeup and treatment response are other major challenges as chemogenetic therapies, regardless of which actuators (DREADDs or PSAMs) are employed, would comprise a personalized n of 1 treatment approach.
irp.nih.gov/accomplishments/…
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2877…
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First human trials of designer protein therapies stun US neuroscientists cen.acs.org/biological-chemi… via @cenmag
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I am astounded, (truly, truly, truly) and filled with hope for us all. This is wonderful news for humanity and I’ll leave it at that.
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Bita Moghaddam بيتا مقدم retweeted
من دارم روی پژوهشی درباره خشونت و رسانههای فارسیزبان کار میکنم و به کمک شما دوستان نیاز دارم:
بدترین نمونههایی که سراغ دارید که در آنها مجریان ایران اینترنشنال و منوتو کشتهشدن ایرانیان را توجیه کردهاند، چه بودهاند؟
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