October 24, 2019
Keio University School of Medicine
Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma Co., Ltd.
Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine
A joint research group centered on Professor Hideyuki Okano of the Department of Physiology, Keio University School of Medicine; Takaya Ishii, a researcher at the Disease iPS Cell-Based Drug Discovery Lab, Research Division, Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma Co., Ltd., and a joint researcher at the Department of Physiology, Keio University School of Medicine; and Professor Norio Ozaki of the Department of Psychiatry and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine, conducted research using iPS cells derived from patients with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia who have genomic copy number variations (CNVs). The group found that morphological abnormalities in neurons are a common pathophysiology in both disorders.
To elucidate the pathophysiology of these psychiatric disorders, this research group focused on novel CNVs thought to be involved in their onset.
First, they established a method to selectively and efficiently differentiate iPS cells, derived from the somatic cells of patients with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia each having different CNVs, into two types of neurons: glutamatergic neurons and GABAergic neurons.
Furthermore, by analyzing these resulting neurons, they revealed that, common to both disorders, the length of dendrites was shortened and the number of synapses that transmit neural information was reduced in both types of neurons.
This research successfully reproduced a common pathophysiology of major psychiatric disorders using patient-derived iPS cells, and it is expected to lead to further elucidation of the pathophysiology of psychiatric disorders and the development of candidate therapeutic drugs.
The results of this research were published in the online journal eNeuro on September 20, 2019 (US Eastern Time).
For the full press release, please see below.