Thanks to a $50,000 grant from the California Bipolar Foundation (CBF) to post-doctoral research fellow Dr. Illyas Singec at the Burnham Institute for Medical Research (BIMR), a research team headed by Dr. Evan Snyder (along with co-investigators Drs. Dieter Wolfe and Lawrence Brill), was able to accumulate sufficient preliminary data to win an extremely competitive Grand Opportunities (GO) grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to explore the molecular basis of Bipolar Disorder (BPD).
BPD is a severe and prominent societal malady with poorly understood etiology. This neuropsychiatric condition is defined by a lifetime of relapsing and remitting manic and depressive episodes and has been shown to have strong genetic linkage with familial predisposition.
The recently funded project represents the convergence of a series of cutting-edge technologies and approaches to better understand the molecular basis of this condition and hopefully identify better and more rational treatments.
Authentic laboratory models -- including animal models -- that reliably represent aspects of BPD (or most human neuropsychiatric diseases) have been difficult to establish. Recent advances in stem cell biology have allowed the conversion of skin cells taken from actual patients into "stem-like cells" called "human induced pluripotent stem cells (hIPSCs)". These skin cells can be "reprogrammed" to the point that they can be induced to yield almost every mature cell type of the body following various differentiation protocols, including brain cells. Such hIPSC-derived brain cells will bear the "molecular fingerprint" of the patient from which the skin cells were taken. Therefore, the first cutting-edge technique to be employed by the team will be to develop a representative, predictive model system to explore function and regulation in brain cells that faithfully recapitulate the underlying defects of actual human patients with BPD.