Aired 9/12/14 on KPBS News.

San Diego scientists have taken a neurochemical fingerprint of schizophrenia. And they did it without probing the brains of lab mice.

San Diego scientists have taken a neurochemical fingerprint of schizophrenia. And they did it without probing the brains of lab mice.

UC San Diego's Vivian Hook, first author of a paper published Thursday in Stem Cell Reports, says mice just wouldn't cut it for her research on schizophrenia.

"The basic reason I didn't do it in mice is because mice naturally don't get schizophrenia," Hook said.

Hook and her colleagues tried a fairly new approach. They took skin cells from three schizophrenia patients, converted them into stem cells, and then turned those stem cells into brain cells. They ended up with tiny brain fragments in a dish, which mirrored the cells inside the actual brains of those human patients.

"We found that the schizophrenic neurons showed aberrant increases in certain neurotransmitters. The cells were pumping out more dopamine, norepinephrine and epinephrine than non-schizophrenic brain cells," Hook said. "There's a chemical imbalance that has been predicted in schizophrenia, and these model schizophrenic-derived nerve cells provide data showing that."

Hook says the study also proves that stem-cell derived neurons can secrete neurotransmitters, just like cells in living human brains. That could open up research into new drugs for schizophrenia, and could potentially help answer longstanding questions about conditions like autism, ALS and Alzheimer's.

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Stem Cells Give San Diego Scientists Useful Portrait Of Schizophrenia