Institute-supported PhD student Natalie Matosin has been working on finding molecules in the brain that are altered in schizophrenia in order to identify new drug targets with the potential to improve the cognitive and negative symptoms associated with the disorder. Along with her supervisors, Dr Kelly Newell and Dr Francesca Fernandez, she has been looking specifically at a receptor in the brain, the metabotropic glutamate receptor 5, or mGluR5.
Together with NeuRA scientists, Dr Samantha Fung and Professor Cyndi Shannon Weickert, Ms Matosin and her team assessed the levels of mGluR5 in the postmortem brains of people that had schizophrenia, and found that in the frontal cortex and hippocampus there were greater numbers of the receptor mGluR5. Since these changes are in brain regions involved in learning and memory, this led our researchers to believe that these changes in mGluR5 might be contributing to the poor cognitive functioning seen in many people with schizophrenia.
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