Education

• B.Sc. Pharmacy, Complutense University of Madrid, Spain
• Ph.D. Medicinal Chemistry, Spanish National Research Council, Spain
• Post-doc VIPBG (Advisors: Javier González-Maeso and Brien Riley)

Research Interests

• Molecular and behavioral fingerprints of psychedelic drugs as fast-acting antidepressants
• Pharmacogenomics applied to drug development in mental health
• Neuropharmacology of the serotonergic system and its integration in the brain physiology

Research Description

The most efficacious medications used in the treatment of mental health were discovered by serendipity, rather than by rationalization of the biological substrate. However, unlike many non-psychiatric conditions, classic pharmacology falls short to account for the complex pathophysiology of mental disorders. Informed by bottom-up integration of genetic and environmental etiological determinants, my research dives deeper on the downstream effect of drugs currently used in psychiatry. The ultimate goal of my research is the identification of drug-actionable hubs, rather than individual target candidates, that can pave the way for novel therapeutic interventions in psychiatry.

My recent work replicates responses of psychedelics as potential fast-acting antidepressants and unveils an epigenomic and transcriptomic-driven framework in cortical neuronal populations as a plausible biological substrate responsible for the observed adaptive changes in behavior. Another ongoing line of research aims to characterize the functional impact of coding variants on the response to antipsychotic drugs.

Awards

• Post-doctoral fellowship, T32MH020030, Research Training: Psychiatric and Statistical Genetics (P.I., Dr. Michael C. Neale), 11/2020-Present
• Alien of Extraordinary Ability, First Preference Employment-based Immigration Category, USCIS 2018
• National Institute for Drug Abuse “Pioneers and Prodigies” Travel Award, International Society for Serotonin Research, 2016
• Young Scientist Award, Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening, 2014

Selected Publications

M de la Fuente Revenga, Zhu B, Guevara CA, Naler LB, Sunders JM, Zhou Z, Toneatti R, Sierra S, Wolstenholme JT, Beardsley PM, Huntley GW, Lu C, Gonzalez-Maeso J. Prolonged epigenetic and synaptic plasticity alterations following single exposure to a psychedelic in mice. Cell Reports (in press)

M de la Fuente Revenga, D Ibi, T Cuddy, R Toneatti, M Kurita, MK Ijaz, MF Miles, JT Wolstenholme, J González-Maeso. Chronic clozapine treatment restrains via HDAC2 the performance of mGlu2/3 agonism in a rodent model of antipsychotic activity. Neuropsychopharmacology 2019 Jan; 44(2):455-456. PMID: 30401942

M de la Fuente Revenga, J Shin, H Vohra, K Hideshima, M Shcneck, J Poklis, J González-Maeso. Fully-automated head-twitch detection system for the study of 5-HT2A receptor pharmacology in vivo. Sci Rep 2019 Oct 3;9(1):14247. PMID: 31582824

S Ma, M de la Fuente Revenga, Z Sun, C Sun, TW Murph, H Xie, J González-Maeso, C Lu. Cell-type-specific Brain Methylomes Profiled via Ultralow-input Microfluidics. Nat Biomed Eng. 2018 Mar;2(3):183-194. PMID: 29963329

Ibi D, de la Fuente Revenga M, Kezunovic N, Muguruza C, Saunders JM, Gaitonde SA, Moreno JL, Ijaz MK, Santosh V, Kozlenkov A, Holloway T, Seto J, García-Bea A, Kurita M, Mosley GE, Jiang Y, Christoffel DJ, Callado LF, Russo SJ, Dracheva S, López-Giménez JF, Ge Y, Escalante CR, Meana JJ, Akbarian S, Huntley GW, González-Maeso J. Antipsychotic-induced Hdac2 transcription via NF-κB leads to synaptic and cognitive side effects. Nat Neurosci. 2017 Sep;20(9):1247-1259. PMID: 28783139