Scientists have taken skin cells from four schizophrenic patients and turned them into brain cells grown in a laboratory dish, allowing living brain cells of humans with this mental illness to be studied for the first time.
Lead author Professor Fred Gage said this petri dish-based study takes environmental influences out of the mental illness equation. The skin cells used in the study were taken from patients with a heredity history of schizophrenia.Researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in the United States found the brain cells, or neurons, generated from four severely schizophrenic patients made fewer connections with each other and had fewer projections growing out from their cell bodies than normal.
"For many years, mental illness has been thought of as a social or environmental disease, and many thought that if affected people just worked through their problems, they could overcome them," says Gage. "What we are showing are real biological dysfunctions in neurons that are independent of the environment."
The group also discovered connectivity of the neurons increased to 80% of normal levels with the use of loxapine, an antipsychotic drug.
"But now, for the very first time, we have a model system that allows us to study how antipsychotic drugs work in live, genetically identical neurons from patients with known clinical outcomes, and we can start correlating pharmacological effects with symptoms."
This study, published in Wednesday’s online edition of the journal Nature, not only has the potential to increase understanding of a disease that affects one percent of the world’s population, but also to assist patients in discovering the drug that works for them personally.
"Most psychiatric patients may try many drugs before they find one that works," Professor Gage said. "This may circumvent that process by enabling individualised treatments with the best drug for them.”
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