Four people with schizophrenia from skin cells have been transformed into cells of the brain or neural and grown in laboratory dishes, the first time a complex mental disorder was examined using life cells in the brain.
Neurons grown in the laboratory have shown less connections between them than in the healthy brain cells, researchers said.
Research not only will help scientists understand the causes of mental illness that plagues the approximately 1% of the population of the world (and about 3 million people in the United States), but also takes a step toward personalized for medicine the afflicted.
"What is so exciting about this approach is that we can examine the patient-derived neurons that are perhaps equivalent to an individual patient have neuronal cells," said researcher Gong Chen, Professor of biology at Penn State. "." The method would also allow researchers to test which drugs might work better for a patient in particular without that person having to try first, Chen added. [Image of schizophrenic brain cells]
"The patient may be his own Guinea pig for the design of its own processing, without having to be experienced on directly," said Chen.
The research is detailed in the April 13 issue of the journal Nature advance online.
?Cell smarts
Challenges in the study of psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia include limited access to the cells of the human brain and the difficulty in teasing genetic from environmental influences on disease, researchers said.
"No one knows how the environment contributes to the disease," said the investigator Kristen Brennand, a postdoctoral researcher at the Salk. "It is by growing neurons in a dish, we can take the environment of the equation and start focusing on the underlying biological problems. [The cells of the brain in a laboratory dish keep time]
And for the team, which also included the pledge of Fred, a professor in the laboratory of genetics of the Salk, started from scratch way, turning the clock back on the cells of the skin from four schizophrenic patients with a history of hereditary disease. They have programmed these cells to become specialized or undifferentiated stem cells called induced pluripotent stem cells. In this way, they avoided removing neurons of the participants.
"A pluripotent stem cell is a kind of blank slate," said Chen. "During development, these cells strains differentiation in several types of diverse cells, specialized, such as a muscle cell, a brain cell or a blood cell."
The team then made stem cells into brain cells and compared neurons resulting with those created from healthy individuals-induced pluripotent stem cells.
Foundations of disease
"No one knows how much the environment contributes to the disease," said Brennand. "It is by growing neurons in a dish, we can take the environment of the equation and start focusing on the underlying biological problems.
And indeed, they found some. Brennand treated neurons in laboratory with a rabies virus amended, that are known that use connections between brain cells. This tracer indicated schizophrenia less frequently connected neurons with one another and had less than projections of growth from their cell bodies.
Genetic analysis also showed about 600 genes whose activity was off kilter in these neurons, with 25% of these genes is linked to schizophrenia in past research.
The team tested the ability of five antipsychotic drugs - clozapine, olanzapine, risperidone and thioridazine, loxapine - for improving neural connectivity in schizophrenia brain cells. Only loxapine significantly increased brain-cell connections of all patients with schizophrenia, researchers write.
At the end of the day, the results can help stigma social meter often attached to mental disorders. "Many people believed that if the persons concerned have worked just thanks to their problems, they could overcome their", said the pledge. "But we are showing real biological dysfunction in neurons which are independent of the environment."
You can follow LiveScience editor Jeanna Bryner on Twitter @ jeannabryner.
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