UCLA Immunometabolism & Mood Disorders Program

Integrating inflammatory biology, metabolic science, and brain circuitry to advance precision treatment in mood disorders.

The UCLA Immunometabolism & Mood Disorders Program examines how systemic biological processes—including inflammatory signaling, metabolic regulation, endocrine function, mitochondrial energetics, and biological aging—interact with brain circuitry, cognition, and clinical course in bipolar disorder and depression.

By integrating longitudinal clinical phenotyping with mechanistic biological investigation, the program advances a dimensional precision psychiatry framework grounded in systems biology. Immunometabolic variation is conceptualized as a continuum, and graded biological differences are examined in relation to symptom expression, cognitive burden, treatment response, illness course, and capacity for sustained well-being.

The scientific direction is grounded in sustained clinical practice and supervision within the UCLA Mood Disorders Clinic, the VA Mood Clinic, faculty practice settings, and leadership within consultation-liaison psychiatry at UCLA Health, ensuring alignment between mechanistic investigation and the complexity of mood disorders across diverse clinical and medical settings, and informed by longstanding translational expertise in inflammatory biology, clinical pharmacology, and mechanism-based intervention research.

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Scientific Focus

The program centers on longitudinal investigation of bipolar disorder and related mood conditions within large-scale collaborative research networks. Dr. Kruse serves as an inaugural Site Principal Investigator in the BD² Integrated Network for bipolar I disorder and leads the longitudinal cohort study at UCLA.

At the consortium level, she leads the Biospecimen and Bioassay Working Group, overseeing assay strategy, data harmonization, and governance across participating U.S. and international sites to ensure scientific rigor and cross-site integration.

Within UCLA, immunometabolic and aging-related measures—including inflammatory profiling, mitochondrial energetics, insulin signaling, endocrine markers, and epigenetic pace-of-aging metrics—are integrated into longitudinal clinical and neuroimaging frameworks. This approach enables investigation of how systemic biological processes relate to neural circuitry, cognitive performance, and mood trajectories over time.

Current work also examines metabolic modulation, including naturalistic investigation of GLP-1 receptor agonist exposure and its associations with mood symptoms, cognitive function, brain structure and connectivity, and cellular energetics.

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Areas of Investigation

• Immunometabolic variation across bipolar disorder and major depression
• Inflammatory signaling and metabolic risk as dimensional predictors of illness course
• Endocrine–immune interactions in treatment resistance
• Mitochondrial energetics and cellular energy utilization
• Epigenetic pace-of-aging and cumulative biological burden
• Neural correlates of systemic immunometabolic burden
• Metabolic modulation, including GLP-1 signaling, in mood trajectories

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Collaborative Framework

The program is embedded within the Adult Division of Psychiatry and the Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology and operates through coordinated multidisciplinary collaboration across UCLA, national partners, and international research networks. Scientific integration spans inflammatory biology, metabolic and endocrine physiology, mitochondrial function, epigenetic aging metrics, multimodal neuroimaging, and longitudinal clinical outcomes. The model is inherently team-based, linking systems biology with brain function and clinical trajectories through cross-disciplinary infrastructure and shared scientific strategy.

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Translational Vision

Advances in cardiometabolic and inflammatory therapeutics demonstrate that targeted modulation of biological pathways can shift disease risk along measurable gradients. This translational perspective informs investigation in mood disorders, where immune and metabolic processes are examined as modifiable contributors to neural circuitry, cognition, and long-term clinical outcomes. Through integration of systems biology, longitudinal phenotyping, and collaborative infrastructure, the program seeks to advance mechanism-informed strategies that improve understanding, treatment, and sustained well-being for individuals living with bipolar disorder and depression.