The Heifets Laboratory
Welcome to the Heifets Lab
Our research group is dedicated to understanding and improving on powerful, rapid-acting therapies for psychiatric disease, such as ketamine, MDMA and psilocybin. We bridge basic science and clinical trials, connecting neuroscience, psychiatry and anesthesiology in pursuit of highly effective, safe treatment strategies scalable to the millions of patients who need them.
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Spent a sublime few days @UCBerkeley w/ fellow #neuroscientist Christof Koch interviewing @michaelpollan on #psychedelics & food, @AlisonGopnik on the developing mind, Dacher Keltner on #Awe, & @Stanford's @TheBorisLab on his novel experiments on the impact of psychedelics during
People Are Stumbling From One Misguided Narrative About the Medical Model to Another
As promised, here is a 2-minute summary of my newly published paper: “MDMA enhances empathy-like behaviors in mice via serotonin release in the nucleus accumbens.”
Science is not complete until it’s communicated! 🗣️
Enormous thanks to @MoeNeuro, @TheBorisLab, & Rob Malenka
Long feature on the risks of ketamine industry (grown from 50 US clinics in 2015 to around 1500 today) yet STILL doesn’t mention people can become dependent on ketamine. 🤯
So thrilled to get this out after sparking this idea years ago bc of you @TheBorisLab ! Stoked to see it out! Yay team!
Congrats @dr_brein @MoeNeuro et al. Glad to have contributed! MDMA enhances social transfer of affective states - something we intuit in humans, and we now have a candidate mechanism for in mice— more to come!
Thrilled to share that my postdoc work from the Malenka lab is out today!
Of course, this work will not be complete until it’s communicated. Short video summary coming soon
MDMA enhances empathy-like behaviors in mice via 5-HT release in the nucleus accumbens | Science Advances
The study integrates numerous experimental approaches to demonstrate neural and molecular substrates through which repeated exposure to cocaine or morphine corrupts an individual's responses to natural rewards. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk6742
https://www.mountsinai.org/about/newsroom/2024/a-common-pathway-in-the-brain-that-enables-addictive-drugs-to-hijack-natural-reward-processing-has-been-identified-by-mount-sinai