It was announced this week that U of Rochester is getting $6-million in funding to take a look at new ways to treat schizophrenia.
The funding is coming from the National Institute of Mental Health. The funds will support research being led by Dr. Steve Goldman and Dr. Maiken Nedergaard – who are currently looking into the role played by support cells in the brain known as “glia” in the disease.
Unlike neurons, glial cells do not transmit the electrical signals that form our thoughts and control voluntary and involuntary movements. Rather, they support neurons by holding the nerve cells in place, supplying them with nutrients and sheathing them with protective insulating material.
Goldman’s and Nedergaard’s new research builds on work the URMC scientists published last year pointing to glial cells’ role in the brain’s signaling activity. Human glial cells implanted in the brains of newborn mice gave the rodents’ enhanced learning ability, they found.
To expand on and test other researchers’ observation of glial cell mutations in the brains of schizophrenics, they also raised mice with glial cells grown from human schizophrenics’ stem cells.
This is good news and a promising new direction area for schizophrenia treatment.
So if I’m reading this right they are looking for something other than the dopamine connection and SZ.
Our hope is that we may define new glial targets for the treatment of schizophrenia, a disease whose treatment strategies have hitherto largely been limited to the suppression of dopaminergic signaling.
I wouldn’t have wanted to have been the adult who volunteered to give my brain stem cells to the research project. Unless they got them from organ donors, but then what is the chance that a early onset sz would donate at the right time?
I’m very glad that this is “proper science”, that is, it involves a hypothesis and some experimentation. When that huge legacy was left for schizophrenia research recently, I have to admit that I thought, "Uh-oh, lots of greedy band-wagoners are going to try to grab funding for “statistical studies and meta-studies,” the ones where they get lots of cash for saying, “People with schizophrenia who tend to eat a lot of fast food have poor outcomes.” It’s not possible to say which is the cause and which the result. I’m pretty sure burgers don’t cause schizophrenia, but I can’t prove it, and they got real research money for writing that s##t. So, sorry, about the mice and all that, but yeah, real science is good!