Susanne Wolf from the Max-Delbrück-Center of Molecular Medicine in Berlin gave a talk at the 29th ECNP Congress in Vienna. On Sunday the 18th she was in symposium S.15 ‘Inflammation in psychosis: diagnosis and treatmenty’. She gave a talk about ‘Targetting microglia activation in schizophrenia by minocycline treatment’. In this interview she talks about the research and the ECNP Congress.
I’m suzanne evolve and i work at the max network center in berlin and i’m a neural psychoneuroimmunology i mainly work with animal models for psychiatric diseases and recently i work with an animal model for schizophrenia and there we want to decipher the mechanisms why did these develops and also we want to search new treatment strategies and we came across recently
As well which is the microglia cell this is the immune cell of the brain and we will want to see if we can find new treatment strategies that aims at this cell so what we did we actually isolated the microglia out of the brains of from our animal model before we did that we evaluated the animals that they have certain behaviors so this is the way how we assess that
There are schizophrenic like for sure they are not full-blown schizophrenic but they have symptoms that we can measure that they have cognitive deficits or that they have an impairment in sensory motor gating for instance and also in social interaction and then we isolated the microglia out of a specific region out of the hippocampus and we subjected this michael
Claire to rna sequencing so we can see the whole transcriptome of this michael client and we saw a huge shift there that a massive deregulation of genes so we had one cluster where genes were massively downregulated and another cluster which genes were massively upregulated compared to control mice and when we treated them with the – cyclin which is an antibiotic
Everything normalized on a transcriptomic level and also on in behavior levels so we have here not a causal effect but we see a very close link between the behavior and the microglia transcriptome after the treatment with – ii for me as a basic researcher it is very important to interact with clinicians and to learn from the clinicians and that’s actually one of
The main reasons why i accepted because i knew it’s going to be a conference where a lot of clinicians present and first of all for me it is always a motivation yeah because i don’t be patient and i don’t see the outcome of my world directly so and also to interact and really see and talk with the clinicians what is needed what they know from the clinic so we can
Apply it in our basic research so what i particularly enjoyed was today discussion about the gene or relations towards the genome and autism disorder that was very very informative also from an methodological point of view how he presented the analysis so that was perfect but in general i also really like the organization of the symposia and how it is laid out so
That you for instance do these lunch sessions that you have the possibility to also go to smaller sessions and have a closer interaction combined with these plenary lectures and i think it’s really perfectly organized i’ve been to many meetings but this one really it’s really amazing i have to say yeah
Transcribed from video
Susanne Wolf – Targetting microglia activation in schizophrenia by minocycline treatment By European College of Neuropsychopharmacology