A New York City researcher with Princeton ties is gaining increasing national recognition for her work in investigating new treatments for depression and other conditions.
Dr. Sarah Hollingsworth Lisanby — Holly, to her family and friends — is the daughter of retired Rear Adm. James and Gladys Lisanby, of South Jefferson Street in Princeton.
She now serves as a professor of clinical psychiatry and chief of the Brain Stimulation and Therapeutic Modulation Division at Columbia University in New York.
Her work, focusing on using electromagnetics to study and treat psychiatric disorders, has led to nationwide media exposure, including television appearances on “Good Morning America” and “The View” and interviews on National Public Radio.
For Lisanby, though, the attention is merely a vehicle for the dissemination of accurate information about depression, and a means of sharing the news about the treatments she and her colleagues are pioneering.
“There’s hope out there,” she said.
Lisanby’s father is a Princeton native, the son of the late Alvin and Rebecca Hollingsworth Lisanby.
By the time Holly was born, the family was living in Arlington, Va., near Washington, D.C., where her father held a naval position in the Pentagon.
Her memories of Princeton stem from holidays and vacations to the South Jefferson Street home where her grandparents resided, and where her parents now make their home.
“I have fond memories of spending summers here when my grandparents were still living, horseback riding and exploring the cave,” she said.
Lisanby graduated from the National Cathedral School and soon enrolled at Duke University, where she graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor’s in mathematics and psychology.
She earned her medical degree from the Duke University School of Medicine and completed her residency in psychiatry at the Duke University Medical Center, where she served as executive chief resident.
The university did not offer a major in neuroscience at the time she was a student; had it been available, that would likely have been her pursuit, she said.
“I’ve always been fascinated by the brain, by the mystery that it represents; how it controls complex functions like cognition,” she said.
An early exposure to research in college led to the realization that a great deal of information about the brain’s function remained unknown, even its function in a normal state, she noted.
Lisanby began volunteering at psychiatric hospitals to stay abreast of research and treatment methods.
In medical school, she had her first glimpse of brain stimulation.
She observed an administration of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) on a patient who was catatonic — “mute and rigid as a board,” she said. “It was pretty dire.”
But the treatment, in which a seizure was induced through electrical stimulation, led to a remarkable turnaround.
“She was given ECT, and that afternoon she was talking,” said Lisanby. “And I just thought, ‘This is amazing. What is it about electricity and a seizure that could be so therapeutic?’”
ECT was first introduced in the 1930s, and had gone out of vogue by the time Lisanby was in medical school. Treatment by medication, like Prozac, had come to the forefront.
Stimulation-based therapy research “wasn’t an overcrowded field,” she said.
At the same time, she noted, none of the medications on the market could outperform ECT in terms of effectiveness. “I wanted to understand that,” she said.
As Lisanby was finishing her residency in 1995, she received an opportunity to do a postdoctoral fellowship with a well-known researcher at Columbia University in New York.
The researcher was investigating a different form of treatment called transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS.
“I thought, ‘Well, let me take a chance on something new,’” she said.
“It excited me, because magnetic stimulation can induce changes in the brain non-invasively. There was a lot of excitement that this might be a very new way of modernizing ECT.”
Research in the use of TMS to perform a magnetic seizure therapy, a safer version of convulsive therapy, led to international recognition for Lisanby.
Recently, she was one of the lead investigators involved in research trials for the NeuroStar TMS Therapy system.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cleared the device for treatment of medication-resistant depression in October, based on the results of those trials.
The noninvasive, painless procedure involves the application of high-frequency magnetic pulses outside the cranium to provoke electrical currents inside a patient’s brain.
The procedure is done in an outpatient setting and requires no sedation or anasthesia.
Treating depression that has proven resistant to medication is “what device-based therapies are all about,” said Lisanby.
The illness can lead to significant disability, even suicide, and those who do not respond to medications may feel like they are doomed to the condition.
“People don’t have to accept this level of suffering,” Lisanby said. “There are options out there.”
TMS therapy is currently limited in availability to major metropolitan medical centers, and, as a relatively new form of treatment, may not be covered by insurance, she said.
That may change in time, as the procedure becomes more common.
“It will be a while before it’s available very widely,” she said. “But this is one step in the process of bringing new treatments closer to the people who need them.”
