[Catherine Harmer:] If you're depressed,
you're more likely to focus on and recognise negative facial expressions
so you're more likely to see other people as looking...
sad or disgusted or angry,
and much less likely to pick up on
the positive facial expressions, such as happy.
We know that these faces are very important to humans,
so these kinds of changes can have a huge effect
on how you would feel
and then how you would behave amongst other people.
Around 1/5 of us will experience depression at some point in our life
and, once you've had 1 or 2 episodes of depression,
the likelihood is that it it will be a recurrent condition.
So it's a huge problem.
It can be hugely disabling and,
although we have treatments that work
-- both drug-based treatments and psychological treatments --
they're far from being the perfect cure.
The pharmaceutical companies are looking at new ways of treating depression
with new types of drugs that might target different parts of the brain,
but we have been in a situation where...
it's very difficult to test out these new drug treatments,
so we've got very clever at developing new treatments,
the chemists and the biologists are very good at coming up with new chemicals
which look like they they might be treatments,
but we don't really know if they're going to work
until they've been tested on a lot of patients in controlled studies,
which takes a lot of time and costs a lot of money.
As we've got a lot of different potential treatments,
we need a way of selecting which ones are likely
to be better than others,
to then go on and be tested in these clinical designs.
So we have a computerised task
where different facial expressions are presented on the screen:
quite briefly, just for half a second,
and then we ask people to indicate which face they can see,
by pressing a keypad.
What we found was that just a single dose of an antidepressant
would affect how someone responded to emotional information.
So, even healthy people, if you gave them an antidepressant,
they'd start recognising more positive facial expressions.
By having a model,
you can begin to test out new treatments using that kind of model.
We're working together with a number of major pharmaceutical companies
to look at their new drug treatments that they've got in development,
to see their effects on these kinds of
very emotional processes.
This will tell us if these drugs are affecting the brain
and the psychology of these emotional processes,
in a similar way to established drug treatments,
which hopefully will mean a reduction in the time it takes
to find these new treatments for depression,
and certainly reduced cost and difficulty in finding these much-needed treatments.
P1Vital is a clinical research organisation
providing experimental medicine models
as an interface between the companies, the industry and academia
and ensuring that the way that we do our science
meets the kinds of guidelines and regulations
that apply to industry.
I think that Oxford is in a unique position
when it comes to this kind of work.
We're lucky in that we have excellent brain-scanning facilities
and expertise in brain scanning
that allows us to really answer questions with the best available technology.
We have clinical research and testing facilities
so we can give people drugs that may not have been
given to that many people before,
and therefore need to be done in a very safe and controlled environment.
I think I've got the best job in the world.
It's really exciting,
it's challenging and I think it's very satisfying
to be doing a job where you're really hoping
to make a difference to the treatment of
such a disabling and also prevalent condition.