Understanding schizophrenia by bridging mouse and human brain circuits
FMI group leader Prof. Georg Keller and Prof. Philip Sterzer from Universitären Psychiatrischen Kliniken (UPK) Basel have jointly been awarded a Schweizerischer Nationalfonds (SNF) grant over 1.5 million CHF to investigate the brain circuit changes that underlie schizophrenia. Keller and Sterzer’s project aims to bridge a gap between fundamental neuroscience and clinical research — by linking discoveries from mouse models to brain activity patterns in humans.
Schizophrenia affects how people think, feel, and perceive reality. Despite decades of research, the neural mechanisms driving this complex condition remain poorly understood. Keller’s team recently discovered that antipsychotic drugs have a distinctive effect on the brain’s cortex in mice: they reduce synchronized activity among a particular subset of neurons in a layer 5 — a deep layer of the brain cortex. These neurons are thought to play a key role in how the brain processes predictions and errors — functions that are often disrupted in schizophrenia.
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