CONOR LISTON, M.D., Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Psychiatry,
Weill Cornell Medicine

My life in the clinic and the lab

I’ve always had an interest in OCD. I’m a neuroscientist and clinically-active psychiatrist, and I treat people suffering from treatment-resistant depression, and others with OCD as well. Much of my research is on the biology of depression—understanding what goes wrong in the brains of people who are depressed, designing better approaches for diagnosing subtypes of depression, and developing new treatments. Our goal is to take some of the approaches we’ve been using in depression and test whether they can be applied to OCD to help us develop better therapies.

I focus on treatment-resistant OCD

There are lots of ways to help people with OCD today, but they don’t work for everybody. Also, the trial and error approach to treatment can take a long time and be very frustrating when a treatment doesn’t work. It would be amazing if we had biomarkers, things we can measure physically, whether it be the blood or brain scans or some other measure, that would tell us something about which patients are most likely to respond to particular treatments so we could predict that in advance. That’s one of the things we’ve been really focused on in depression, using brain scans to discover biological subtypes of depression and using them to predict who will respond to particular treatments. We want to do this for OCD, and that’s where Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) comes in—mapping which specific connections are abnormal in which specific individuals might be useful in targeting and tailoring TMS treatments.

When we map the circuits, We map the disease

Ultimately, we’re not just interested in using the scans to map connections in the brain of OCD patients—we’re also using them to discover subtypes of OCD that are defined by different kinds of 
abnormal connections.