New hope on brain illness cure

MELBOURNE scientists will transform skin biopsies taken from schizophrenia patients into stem cells in an effort to shed light on the cause and pathology of the disease.
The cutting-edge science, which could eliminate the need to use human embryos, was pioneered in Japan. Like embryonic stem cells, induced pluripotent stem (IPS) cells can be engineered to produce any kind of cell, including neural cells.
Now, in what is believed to be a world first, scientists at Melbourne's O'Brien Institute will use the technique to investigate schizophrenia, which affects about one in 100 people. Their work is aimed at showing how the disease alters the brain and could lead to better treatments or a cure.
The scientists have ethics approval to recruit a dozen schizophrenia patients, who will provide skin biopsies of 5 millimetres cubed. They will isolate skin cells (known as fibroblasts) from the biopsies, then genetically reprogram them to become stem cells.
The research will build on work already done at the O'Brien Institute taking stem cells from the post-mortem brain tissue of healthy people and modifying them so they behave more like stem cells from people with schizophrenia.
The work has allowed researchers to isolate a gene important in brain development - DISC1 - which is impaired in some schizophrenia patients.
Schizophrenia is underpinned by a handful of abnormal genes, and the aim is to work out their individual role in the disease and how they interact with environmental factors such as maternal infections.
It is hoped that analysing stem cells from live schizophrenia patients - cells that already have all the coding for the disease - will develop understanding.
Researchers will also compare their findings with data from other sources including brain imaging of the patients.
The O'Brien Institute's director of stem cell medicine, Dr Jeremy Crook, said human stem cells were a powerful tool and using them - rather than mice - for the first time to investigate schizophrenia would create a biologically relevant model of the disease.
''The sort of work we are doing will hopefully provide insight into the biology including for people like [executive director of Orygen Youth Health and Australian of the Year] Professor Pat McGorry, who is interested in treating patients before their symptoms become apparent in early adulthood,'' he said.
Dr Crook said the stem cells derived from schizophrenia patients could be used to screen drugs by testing whether they normalised the cells in the petri dish. IPS cells have the potential to treat other diseases including Alzheimer's, Huntington's, cardiovascular disease and diabetes.