Patients' own cells may shed light into schizophrenia causes: Study

Researchers at Penn State University, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and other institutions have successfully recreated a schizophrenic patient's own brain cells, which can be studied safely and effectively in a Petri dish.

The development offers researchers a new way to understanding the biological underpinnings of schizophrenia.

It is also expected to be used to study other mysterious diseases such as autism and bipolar disorder, and the researchers hope that it will open the door to personalised medicine -- customised treatments for individual sufferers of a disease based on genetic and cellular information.
 
Gong Chen, an associate professor of biology at Penn State and one of the study's authors, explained that the team first took samples of skin cells from schizophrenic patients.

Then, using molecular-biology techniques, they reprogrammed these original skin cells to become unspecialised or undifferentiated stem cells called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs).

"A pluripotent stem cell is a kind of blank slate," said Chen.

"During development, such stem cells differentiate into many diverse, specialised cell types, such as a muscle cell, a brain cell, or a blood cell," added Chen.

After generating iPSCs from skin cells, the authors cultured them to become brain cells, or neurons. They then compared the neurons derived from schizophrenic patients to the neurons created from the iPSCs of healthy individuals.

They found that the neurons generated from schizophrenic patients were, in fact, distinct: compared with healthy neurons, they made fewer connections with each other.

Kristen Brennand, a Salk researcher and one of the study's authors, then administered a number of frequently prescribed antipsychotic medications to test the drugs' ability to improve how neurons communicate with neighboring cells.

"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," said Brennand.

Chen, who contributed to the study by using electrophysiology techniques to test the function of the iPSC-derived neurons, described the new method as "patient specific," offering a step toward personalised medicine for sufferers of schizophrenia and potentially other diseases.

"What's so exciting about this approach is that we can examine patient-derived neurons that are perhaps equivalent to a particular patient's own neural cells," said Chen.

"Obviously, we don't want to remove someone's brain cells to experiment on, so recreating the patient's brain cells in a Petri dish is the next best thing for research purposes. Using this method, we can figure out how a particular drug will affect that particular patient's brain cells, without needing the patient to try the drug, and potentially, to suffer the side effects. The patient can be his or her own guinea pig for the design of his or her own treatment, without having to be experimented on directly," added Chen.

The study will be published in a future edition of the journal Nature.