* . *
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Privacy & Policy
  • Contact
Tuesday, October 7, 2025
Earth-News
  • Home
  • Business
  • Entertainment
    Row K Entertainment Emerges as Major New Hollywood Buyer With Splashy TIFF Shopping Spree – TheWrap

    Row K Entertainment Emerges as Major New Hollywood Buyer With Splashy TIFF Shopping Spree – TheWrap

    Charlie Hunnam Reflects on Playing a Serial Killer in Monster: The Ed Gein Story – Yahoo

    Charlie Hunnam Reveals the Dark Challenges of Playing a Serial Killer in Monster: The Ed Gein Story

    “Reba” cast, then and now: See the stars 24 years later (and who’s reunited for another show) – Yahoo

    “Reba” cast, then and now: See the stars 24 years later (and who’s reunited for another show) – Yahoo

    Why Taylor Swift Name-Dropped Elizabeth Taylor in Her New Album – Yahoo

    Here’s Why Taylor Swift Dropped Elizabeth Taylor’s Name in Her New Album

    Al Roker Gives Olivia Dean an Unexpected ‘New Job’ on the ‘Today’ Show – Yahoo

    Al Roker Shocks Olivia Dean with an Exciting New Role on the ‘Today’ Show

    Books about the arts and some haunts for a Denton October – Denton Record-Chronicle

    Uncover Artistic Treasures and Spooky Adventures to Experience in Denton This October

  • General
  • Health
  • News

    Cracking the Code: Why China’s Economic Challenges Aren’t Shaking Markets, Unlike America’s” – Bloomberg

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Trending Tags

    • Trump Inauguration
    • United Stated
    • White House
    • Market Stories
    • Election Results
  • Science
  • Sports
  • Technology
    ARM Institute opens technology project call to speed submarine manufacturing – The Robot Report

    ARM Institute Unveils Cutting-Edge Technology Project to Revolutionize Submarine Manufacturing

    Forget Cowbells. Cows Wear High-Tech Collars Now. – The New York Times

    Ditch the Cowbells: Discover the High-Tech Collars Transforming Cattle Care

    What the Recent Price Surge Means for Figure Technology Solutions After SEC Settlement – Yahoo Finance

    What the Recent Price Surge Reveals About Figure Technology Solutions Following SEC Settlement

    MAC Brings iPad Technology to Football Sidelines Across All 13 Member Schools – Sports Video Group

    MAC Brings iPad Technology to Football Sidelines Across All 13 Member Schools – Sports Video Group

    Technology Is Becoming More Important Than Humans In CX – No Jitter

    Technology Is Becoming More Important Than Humans In CX – No Jitter

    A Tech Expo Shows What China Can Make, but Not Who’ll Buy It All – The New York Times

    Inside China’s Tech Expo: Cutting-Edge Innovations Face Uncertain Demand

    Trending Tags

    • Nintendo Switch
    • CES 2017
    • Playstation 4 Pro
    • Mark Zuckerberg
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Business
  • Entertainment
    Row K Entertainment Emerges as Major New Hollywood Buyer With Splashy TIFF Shopping Spree – TheWrap

    Row K Entertainment Emerges as Major New Hollywood Buyer With Splashy TIFF Shopping Spree – TheWrap

    Charlie Hunnam Reflects on Playing a Serial Killer in Monster: The Ed Gein Story – Yahoo

    Charlie Hunnam Reveals the Dark Challenges of Playing a Serial Killer in Monster: The Ed Gein Story

    “Reba” cast, then and now: See the stars 24 years later (and who’s reunited for another show) – Yahoo

    “Reba” cast, then and now: See the stars 24 years later (and who’s reunited for another show) – Yahoo

    Why Taylor Swift Name-Dropped Elizabeth Taylor in Her New Album – Yahoo

    Here’s Why Taylor Swift Dropped Elizabeth Taylor’s Name in Her New Album

    Al Roker Gives Olivia Dean an Unexpected ‘New Job’ on the ‘Today’ Show – Yahoo

    Al Roker Shocks Olivia Dean with an Exciting New Role on the ‘Today’ Show

    Books about the arts and some haunts for a Denton October – Denton Record-Chronicle

    Uncover Artistic Treasures and Spooky Adventures to Experience in Denton This October

  • General
  • Health
  • News

    Cracking the Code: Why China’s Economic Challenges Aren’t Shaking Markets, Unlike America’s” – Bloomberg

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Trending Tags

    • Trump Inauguration
    • United Stated
    • White House
    • Market Stories
    • Election Results
  • Science
  • Sports
  • Technology
    ARM Institute opens technology project call to speed submarine manufacturing – The Robot Report

    ARM Institute Unveils Cutting-Edge Technology Project to Revolutionize Submarine Manufacturing

    Forget Cowbells. Cows Wear High-Tech Collars Now. – The New York Times

    Ditch the Cowbells: Discover the High-Tech Collars Transforming Cattle Care

    What the Recent Price Surge Means for Figure Technology Solutions After SEC Settlement – Yahoo Finance

    What the Recent Price Surge Reveals About Figure Technology Solutions Following SEC Settlement

    MAC Brings iPad Technology to Football Sidelines Across All 13 Member Schools – Sports Video Group

    MAC Brings iPad Technology to Football Sidelines Across All 13 Member Schools – Sports Video Group

    Technology Is Becoming More Important Than Humans In CX – No Jitter

    Technology Is Becoming More Important Than Humans In CX – No Jitter

    A Tech Expo Shows What China Can Make, but Not Who’ll Buy It All – The New York Times

    Inside China’s Tech Expo: Cutting-Edge Innovations Face Uncertain Demand

    Trending Tags

    • Nintendo Switch
    • CES 2017
    • Playstation 4 Pro
    • Mark Zuckerberg
No Result
View All Result
Earth-News
No Result
View All Result
Home Health

Q&A: How a stem cell bank is helping scientists understand psychiatric disorders

July 29, 2024
in Health
Q&A: How a stem cell bank is helping scientists understand psychiatric disorders
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter

neuron

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

When Ralda Nehme, a cell biologist and neuroscientist, first started her lab at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in 2018, she realized a gap in the field. She was adept at growing stem cells in the lab, converting them into neurons, and using those cells to study the effects of genetic mutations linked to schizophrenia.

But she soon realized that to truly capture the complexity of human disease, she would need to study a large number of cells from many people with or without the disease and with different genetic backgrounds.

To meet this goal, Nehme and her lab established the Stanley Center’s Stem Cell Resource. Blood or skin cells from donors can be treated with special proteins to turn them into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), which Nehme’s team then differentiates into any cell type in the human body, all bearing the donor’s genetic makeup, including any disease-causing gene variants.

Currently, the resource holds frozen cell lines from about 1,000 donors with a range of diagnoses and ancestral backgrounds, which scientists can use to generate different cell types that more faithfully model human disease than animal cell lines.

We spoke with Nehme about why these models are particularly useful for studying psychiatric conditions, important considerations for new cell lines, and her hopes for the future in this Q&A.

Why are iPSCs useful for studying psychiatric conditions?

For psychiatric disorders, having access to living human cells that we can manipulate in the dish is critical. The human component is important because we need to take the genetic landscape into consideration. In a mouse, we can manipulate the expression of a specific gene, but we typically don’t manipulate the expression of hundreds or thousands of genes at once.

But human cells include that genetic background, which can really influence disease. And while human brain tissue is valuable, we often have limited access to postmortem brain tissue during specific stages of development, and we can’t treat postmortem tissue with drugs or genetic perturbations and study how cells respond.

Of course, stem cells aren’t perfect and there are artifacts due to culturing. People say, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” It’s very true.

What kinds of questions is your lab trying to answer with these cells?

We have many different ongoing studies looking at how cells from different people respond to pharmacological perturbations such as antipsychotic medications. We know that different people respond in different ways to the same drug, but we don’t always know why.

In the lab, we can treat astrocytes and neurons from patients with schizophrenia with different medications and see how the cells respond at the molecular level. We’re beginning to see some really interesting differences in the cells after certain perturbations.

In a collaboration with Anne Carpenter and Soumya Raychaudhuri, we looked at cell morphology across iPS cell lines derived from roughly 300 people, and we were able to identify cell morphology traits that are associated with specific genetic variants.

In a follow-up study, we’re applying a similar approach to neurons, astrocytes, and neural progenitor cells to identify in an unbiased way how cell morphology is affected by the presence of specific genetic variants.

The possible applications are almost limitless. The more data types we generate and integrate across different labs, the more powerful a resource it’s going to be.

Why would a researcher want to study a disease process in cells?

We want to perform biological experiments at a scale that is sufficient to generate enough data to define relationships such as which genes cause disease in a statistically significant way. One way we can do that is to study thousands of cell lines at a reasonable cost and within a reasonable timeframe—which is much harder to do in animal models.

In collaboration with Steve McCarroll, we developed “cell village” experimental systems where we can mix cells from many different people together all in one dish and treat them with a certain agent. Then we use the cells’ DNA to identify the donor of each cell. If you wanted to study cells from 100 people, instead of having 100 dishes in the incubator, we’d have just one.

Are there any cell types that you’re particularly excited about being able to generate?

Astrocytes are a cell type that is abundant in the brain and has many different functions. They interact with neurons and a lot of genes that are critical for these interactions have been implicated in many psychiatric neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders.

So in a collaboration with Lindy Barrett’s lab in the Stanley Center, we developed a way to make astrocytes that is very scalable. We can now make them in a month. It used to take six. We can even grow them together with human neurons.

For a while, the whole field was using rodent astrocytes in co-culture with the human neurons, but human neurons really need the presence of the astrocytes to become functional. Having found a way around this is going to enable a lot of exciting approaches where we can manipulate genes and cellular programs in astrocytes and ask what the effect is on neurons. Being able to manipulate this biology in a disease-relevant context is really helpful.

Why is genetic diversity in these cells so important?

First, it’s important to study not just cells from males but also females. For a while, a lot of people in the stem cell field were only focusing on using cells that are derived from white males to make the cohort more homogeneous. But when we focus on white males, we then miss a big chunk of biology.

Second, to drive scientific discovery, it’s critical to capture as many variants as possible in different genes. Some variants are represented in a different way in different ancestral populations; some are not present at all in one population, but are in another. We also know that genetic ancestry can affect how well we can make stem cells from different populations by impacting differentiation and other cellular phenotypes.

Finally, we know that most clinical trials are based in the U.S. or in Europe. As a result, drug safety and toxicity studies are often tailored for populations in the U.S. and in Europe, and populations outside of these continents are often not as thoroughly considered.

It’s impossible to run clinical trials for every drug in many different countries for cost reasons, but it’s possible to take cells from any person anywhere in the world, make stem cells, and then try to see how they respond to drugs. That could be a game changer for many of these medications and populations down the road.

What do you hope to see from the field in the next 10 years?

We need better models of psychiatric conditions that are informed from the large amount of data we now have from profiling postmortem brains, for example, that can inform the next generation of better stem cell-based models with increased fidelity to in vivo profiles.

To do that, we need access to more cell lines from different populations that are quality controlled, cataloged, and accessible to the community. I think there’s a really important role from funding agencies to encourage the use of many different cell lines and fund this kind of work, which is expensive and impossible for many labs.

But I also think we can lower the bar and make this kind of work more accessible. Realistically, it’s hard for many labs to work with a hundred cell lines at a time. But we can build stem cell villages and freeze them, and then people can then just work with one vial. The work is very similar to working with just one cell line, except that they’ll have access to a hundred cell lines.

We work with cells from so many people, including a lot of patients that are affected with these debilitating disorders and their families. It’s an incredible privilege to work with this resource, and I feel very fortunate to be able to help researchers use it to ask interesting questions.

Citation:
Q&A: How a stem cell bank is helping scientists understand psychiatric disorders (2024, July 27)
retrieved 28 July 2024
from https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-07-qa-stem-cell-bank-scientists.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.

>>> Read full article>>>
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source : Medical Xpress – https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-07-qa-stem-cell-bank-scientists.html

Tags: healthHelpingScientists
Previous Post

Children less likely to have type 1 diabetes if mother has condition than if father is affected, study finds

Next Post

Helping our bodies beat the heat

Jason Anderson Signs for Suzuki for 2026 SMX World Championship – Monster Energy AMA Supercross

Jason Anderson Signs for Suzuki for 2026 SMX World Championship – Monster Energy AMA Supercross

October 7, 2025
Downtown St. Paul’s economy showing new life after state employees mandated to return to office – 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS

Downtown St. Paul Thrives Again as State Employees Return to the Office

October 7, 2025
No, Anthony Boyle Didn’t Use a Prosthetic in His House of Guinness Bath Scene – Yahoo

Anthony Boyle Opens Up About the Shocking Truth Behind His House of Gucci Bath Scene

October 7, 2025
Ozzy Osbourne documentary reveals agonizing health struggles of his final years – USA Today

Inside Ozzy Osbourne’s Heartbreaking Battle with Health in His Final Years

October 7, 2025
Latino leaders explore the role community organizing can play in national politics – OSV News

Latino Leaders Unite to Amplify Community Power and Drive National Change

October 7, 2025
Ecology blazing the trail for more clean energy projects – Washington State Department of Ecology (.gov)

How Ecology is Powering the Shift to a Greener Energy Future

October 7, 2025
Penn State Brandywine Earth sciences professor earns two national awards – Penn State University

Penn State Brandywine Earth sciences professor earns two national awards – Penn State University

October 7, 2025
UNESCO and CODATA launch resources on open science for crisis response – unesco.org

UNESCO and CODATA Launch Innovative Open Science Tools to Enhance Crisis Response

October 7, 2025
New Engen Report Identifies Key Trends and Winning Strategies for Active Lifestyle Brands in 2025 and Beyond – Fitt Insider

New Engen Report Identifies Key Trends and Winning Strategies for Active Lifestyle Brands in 2025 and Beyond – Fitt Insider

October 7, 2025
ARM Institute opens technology project call to speed submarine manufacturing – The Robot Report

ARM Institute Unveils Cutting-Edge Technology Project to Revolutionize Submarine Manufacturing

October 7, 2025

Categories

Archives

October 2025
M T W T F S S
 12345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031  
« Sep    
Earth-News.info

The Earth News is an independent English-language daily published Website from all around the World News

Browse by Category

  • Business (20,132)
  • Ecology (855)
  • Economy (876)
  • Entertainment (21,749)
  • General (17,457)
  • Health (9,918)
  • Lifestyle (888)
  • News (22,149)
  • People (877)
  • Politics (887)
  • Science (16,086)
  • Sports (21,376)
  • Technology (15,856)
  • World (859)

Recent News

Jason Anderson Signs for Suzuki for 2026 SMX World Championship – Monster Energy AMA Supercross

Jason Anderson Signs for Suzuki for 2026 SMX World Championship – Monster Energy AMA Supercross

October 7, 2025
Downtown St. Paul’s economy showing new life after state employees mandated to return to office – 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS

Downtown St. Paul Thrives Again as State Employees Return to the Office

October 7, 2025
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Privacy & Policy
  • Contact

© 2023 earth-news.info

No Result
View All Result

© 2023 earth-news.info

No Result
View All Result

© 2023 earth-news.info

Go to mobile version