July 22, 2025
Hope for Major Depression
Researcher Rebecca Price developed an effective depression therapy. Now, with Pitt's help, she is working to bring it to the public.
Designs on Aging-Ready
By Andrew Michael Doerfler
In 2022, Rebecca Price wrapped up a clinical trial on a major depression treatment she knew had potential to improve lives.
Now, three years later, after filing an invention disclosure with the University of Pittsburgh, she has a licensing option with a company looking to market the therapy, while Pitt has filed patent applications for it in the United States and more than a dozen other countries.
Her treatment pairs computer-based exercises called Automated Self-Association Training (ASAT) with ketamine infusions. A National Institute of Mental Health grant supported the research.
Price, associate professor of psychiatry, School of Medicine, showed trial participants repeated groups of self-related words and images paired with positive cues, such as a photo of themselves and then a photo of a stranger smiling. The goal was to harness the brain’s neuroplasticity—its ability to form and reorganize synaptic connections—to support learning and recover from depression.
Patients reported an immediate reduction in depression symptoms that continued for about 90 days.
Patients sometimes require an external stimulus to boost neuroplasticity and unlock the benefits of ASAT, so study participants—before going through ASAT—received a low-dose ketamine infusion. Ketamine, an anesthetic known for its rapid antidepressant effects, can enhance neuroplasticity.
The system worked. Patients reported an immediate reduction in depression symptoms that continued for about 90 days.
“I had a sense that this could be something that would be helpful,” Price says. “I was getting emails from people who are treating depression in the real world, and people who are suffering with it or have a family member suffering with it, and they heard about our findings, and they wanted it. They wanted access to it. And so that was an important encouragement to me that there is a market for this.”
Price is also partnering with Syndeio Biosciences, a clinical-stage biotechnology company for which Anantha Shekhar, senior vice chancellor for the health sciences and John and Gertrude Petersen dean, School of Medicine, is a scientific advisor on an investigator-initiated study to test a new depression-drug candidate as a substitute for ketamine. There’s potential for Price to license the software she developed to Syndeio.
Price says her goal for everything she develops is to get it into the public’s hands. “I’ve always been interested in making sure whatever I’m working on in research gets to people,” she says.
“Bringing this therapy to market isn’t just about innovation—it’s about impact,” says Price, also an associate professor of psychology, School of Medicine, and of clinical and translational science. “Every step toward commercialization is a step closer to someone getting their life back.”