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Frank H. Burton, Ph.D. Adjunct Associate Professor, Departments of Integrative Biology & Physiology and Pharmacology E-mail: burto006@umn.edu Star Tribune Article on "Ticcy" Mice

Research Interests:

Our laboratory's research seeks to understand and treat tics and compulsions in Tourette's syndrome (TS), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and trichotillomania (TTM).

We created the transgenic "Ticcy" mouse, the first animal model of comorbid TS+OCD and TTM. We're now characterizing the dependent biochemical measures (neurotransmitter, receptor and intracellular changes) associated with tics and compulsions, and how they change after drug-alleviation of symptoms and between models of compulsion vs. attention-deficit.

Because the "Ticcy" mice are a drug response-predictive model suitable for rapid-throughput screening of prospective new drugs, Dr. Burton has also gone part-time to start up Psyncretis, Inc., to develop such drugs for these and other disorders comprising biochemically-related small (orphan)-to-large "nested" markets.

Our academic-"U" lab and spin-off company are now both physically sited in a combined academic+private biotech incubator affiliated with Minneapolis Medical Research Foundation (MMRF) and Hennepin County Medical Center (HCMC), next to the Metrodome and Minneapolis' new biotech-biomed incubator, the Elliot Park Lifesciences Institute (EPLI). The company will seek to translate our basic research to the clinic with its Midwest-to-West Coast network of clinical colleagues.

Most Cited Publications:

(For a comprehensive list of recent publications, refer to PubMed, a service provided by the National Library of Medicine.)

Nordstrom, E.J. and Burton, F.H. (2002). A transgenic model of comorbid Tourette's syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder circuitry. Mol Psychiatry 7, 617-625.

Campbell, M.J., Veldman, M.B., McGrath M.J. and Burton, F.H. (2000). TS+OCD-like neuropotentiated mice are supersensitive to seizure induction. NeuroReport, 11, 2335-2338.

McGrath, M.J., Campbell, K.M., Parks, C.R. III and Burton, F.H. (2000). Glutamatergic drugs exacerbate symptomatic behavior in a transgenic model of comorbid Tourette's Syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Brain Res., 877, 23-30.