July 18, 2023 – A new finding from Northwestern Medicine scientists provides a new avenue to develop more effective drugs to treat the debilitating symptoms of schizophrenia. Traditionally, researchers have screened antipsychotic drug candidates by evaluating their effects on mouse behavior, but the approach used by a Northwestern lab outperformed these traditional approaches in terms of predicting efficacy in patients.
The study discovered that antipsychotic drugs—which inhibit the overactive dopamine causing the symptoms of schizophrenia—interact with a completely different neuron than scientists originally believed.
“This is a landmark finding that completely revises our understanding of the neural basis for psychosis and charts a new path for developing new treatments for it,” said lead investigator Jones Parker, assistant professor of neuroscience at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.” It opens new options to develop drugs that have fewer adverse side effects than the current ones.”
The study was recently published in Nature Neuroscience.
Individuals with schizophrenia have increased levels of dopamine in a region of the brain called the striatum. This region has two primary types of specialized brain cells called neurons: those that have D1 dopamine receptors and those that have D2 dopamine receptors.
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