Julio Licinio

Education

Licinio lived in the United States for 25 years (1984–2009), but originally received his MD from the Federal University of Bahia in 1982, and completed his residency in internal medicine at the University of São Paulo from 1982 to 1984. He then moved to the United States and completed training in endocrinology at The University of Chicago, and psychiatry at Albert Einstein in the Bronx as well as at Weill Cornell Medical College. Licinio is registered as a specialist in psychiatry by the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency. He is board certified in psychiatry by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology and he is a Fellow of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, the American Psychiatric Association, and the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology.

Career

Licinio was previously an assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale University, then he was a Unit Chief within the Clinical Neurodocrinology Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health NIH Intramural Research Program (1993–1999), and later was professor of psychiatry and medicine/endocrinology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA from 1999 until 2006, where he had multiple roles, such as Founding Director of three NIH funded programs: the Interdepartmental Center on Clinical Pharmacology, the Graduate Training in Translational and Clinical Investigation and the Mentored Clinical Pharmacology Scholars Program; he also co-directed (with Ma-Li Wong) the UCLA Center for Pharmacogenomics, was Associate Program Director of the UCLA General Clinical Research Center, and Vice-Chair of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences. In 2006 he was appointed the Miller Professor of Psychiatry, Chairman of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences and subsequently Associate Dean for project development, responsible for starting the Clinical and Translational Science Institute at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, where he worked until 2009, when he moved to Australia as Director of the John Curtin School of Medical Research.

During the period 1993–2001, Licinio was a Temporary Advisor to the World Health Organization (WHO), having co-chaired ten WHO scientific meetings in seven countries, and co-edited the resulting ten books containing the proceedings of those meetings, mostly focused on the role of dysthymia in neurological disorders.

In 2005–2010, Licinio was a member of the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services Advisory Committee of Genetics Health and Society (SACGHS). The key issue addressed during his term was the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA), which was strongly supported by the SACGHS. GINA was enacted on 21 May 2008 (Pub.L. 110–233, 122 Stat. 881) as an Act of Congress in the United States, designed to prohibit the use of genetic information in health insurance and employment. The Act prohibits group health plans and health insurers from denying coverage to a healthy individual or charging that person higher premiums based solely on a genetic predisposition to developing a disease in the future. The legislation also bars employers from using individuals' genetic information when making hiring, firing, job placement, or promotion decisions. Senator Ted Kennedy called it the "first major new civil rights bill of the new century." The Act contains amendments to the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 and the Internal Revenue Code of 1986.

Licinio's work has broad international recognition. He has advised on more than 90 review panels and committees, had over 200 abstracts at meeting presentations, and organised more than 60 symposia, conferences and workshops. He is the head of the Australian node of the German-Australian Institute for Translational Medicine (GAITM), directed by Stefan R. Bornstein. In 2013 he gave the opening Presidential Lecture at the European Congress of Psychiatry, Nice, France, the Eliahu Youdim Memorial Lecture at National Institute for Psychobiology in Jerusalem, Israel, the Kester Brown (opening) Lecture at the Australian Society of Anaesthesiology Annual Meeting in Canberra, the Roche Oration, Australasian Society of Psychiatric Research in Melbourne, the Opening Plenary Lecture at the Bio21 Cluster and Museum Victoria Conference: Biological Markers for Mental Health. He delivered the opening keynote lecture of the German 2014 Conference “Biomarkers & Biologically guided options of Child Psychiatric Disorders” in Frankfurt, and was appointed Visiting Professor of Psychiatry at Paris Descartes University (Université Paris 5 René Descartes, also known as Paris V) (2012-2014) and University of Minho, Braga, Portugal, competitively funded by the governments of France and Portugal. He was invited to give a Distinguished Psychiatrist lecture at the meeting of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) of which he is a member (past co-chair) of the Scientific Program Committee. In the last 5 years he published collaboratively with 190 colleagues from 54 institutions, located in 19 countries, including Nobel Laureates Andrew Schally and Rita Levi-Montalcini. He is a current reviewer for the large translational centre programs funded by the governments of the UK (Biomedical Research Centres and Units, NIHR), Canada (Support for People and Patient-Oriented Research and Trials – SUPPORT – Units, Canadian Institutes of Health Research), and Switzerland (National Centers for Competence in Research, Swiss National Science Foundation).

Scientific research

According to Google Scholar, Licinio has an h-index of 65, with over 21,000 citations. He has published over 240 papers indexed in Pubmed, as well as 12 books.

Licinio is known for his research into leptin and its role in conveying a feeling of satiety. For example, in 2002, he identified three people from Turkey who suffered from a genetic disorder called leptin deficiency – the only three adults known at that time to have this disorder – all of whom were severely overweight as a result. He then administered daily leptin injections to each of them, and found that after ten months, the patients had lost half of his or her original body weight. He discovered that despite being produced by a dispersed mass of fat cells, leptin is secreted in a highly organised manner with distinct pulsatility and circadian rhythm and that it appears to regulate the minute-to-minute rhythms of several endocrine axes, such as the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, the hypothalamic–pituitary–thyroid axis, and the hypothalamic–pituitary–gonadal axis. Licinio and his colleagues were the first to suggest that leptin may have antidepressant effects, a concept that was subsequently extended by other groups. He also contributed to pioneer the concept that leptin has pro-cognitive effects in humans.

With his group, Licinio conducted an extensive body of work on the pharmacogenomics of depression that started in 2000 as part of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences NIH Pharmacogenomics Research Network (PGRN). In that project, he and his team studied a Mexican-American population with major depressive disorder in the city of Los Angeles, in the context of an extensive process of community engagement, which received Certificates of Commendation both from the California State Legislature and the United States Congress. He contributed the Mexican-American samples to the International HapMap Project. His pharmacogenetics research has resulted in several publications on predictors of antidepressant treatment response in this population.

Wong and Licinio contributed some of the earliest work on the role of cytokines and immune mediators in the brain, with implications for the underlying biology of major depressive disorder, and published scientific articles on the localisation of gene expression for interleukin 1 receptor antagonist, interleukin 1 receptor, type I (IL1R1), also known as CD121a (C lustre of D ifferentiation 121a), and inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) in mammalian brain. They also showed that interleukin 1 receptor antagonist is an endogenous neuroprotective agent. They have shown that the central and peripheral cytokine compartments are integrated but differentially regulated. In collaboration with colleagues at Columbia University Licinio and his team showed that inflammation-mediated up-regulation of secretory sphingomyelin phosphodiesterase in vivo represents a possible link between inflammatory cytokines and atherogenesis. Licinio's line of research examining the effects of peripheral inflammation in brain, behaviour and metabolism is ongoing in their lab.

Teaching

Licinio conceptualised, obtained funding for, and directed three graduate training programs with master's degrees in translational investigation, for physician-scientists, at UCLA (supported by an NIH K30 award), University of Miami (supported by an NIH K30 award), and Australian National University. He also created and obtained NIH T32, NIH K12, and PhRMA Foundation (2004 Center of Excellence in Clinical Pharmacology) funding for the UCLA Interdepartmental Clinical Pharmacology Training Program, of which he was founding director (1999–2006). Licinio was the recipient of an NIH K24 award to mentor early career physician-scientists (2002–2007).

Public engagement

Licinio is often asked to comment on items related to his field and more broadly to medical research, science, and academic career development in general. He wrote four book reviews for Science, including a commentary on the current diagnostic system in psychiatry, the American Psychiatry Association (APA)'s "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders", Fifth Edition (DSM-5) and the controversial exhibit on Sigmund Freud at the US Library of Congress. Licinio writes a popular blog on science-related matters for the general public.

Personal life

Licinio's wife, Ma-Li Wong is also an expert on depression, pharmacogenomics and psychoneuroimmunology; they have worked together for over 20 years, and have co-authored over 150 papers, and co-edited two multi-authored books on pharmacogenomics and the biology of depression. Wong and Licinio have two adult children.