Lab Chat: Finding drugs for schizophrenia using T cells 

A NEW DRUG TARGET IN NEURONAL CELLS (SANTIAGO LAGO/UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE)

There is a desperate need for new drugs for schizophrenia, as some 75% of patients don’t fully respond to the available drugs. It can take many months, if not years, to find effective medication. A new study compared T cells from schizophrenia patients and healthy people and found marked differences in how these cells responded to various chemical stimuli and potential new compounds. The scientists also confirmed their findings in neuronal cells. I spoke to University of Cambridge neuroscientists Sabine Bahn and Santiago Lago to learn more about their study, published in Science Advances.

Why use blood cells from patients?

Bahn: A big problem with psychiatry is that you can't take out living bits of the brain. The way that drugs are discovered is through animal models. But you can't ask a mouse if it’s hearing voices or think people are out to get it, which are core symptoms of schizophrenia. But if we can't take brain tissue, maybe other tissues may reflect some of the abnormal behavior we see.

What did you find?

Lago: The main difference was with calcium signaling. We then did a drug screen that prioritized this [calcium signaling] as a drug target. And we found several groups of compounds — including antihypertensives and corticosteroids — which were able to normalize calcium signaling in the cells.