Daniel Lodge, PhD, is fascinated by the human brain.
"There's a lot that we don't understand about brain function in normal conditions," Lodge said, "and if we don't know how it works under normal situations, how are we going to understand how it works when things are dysfunctional?"
Lodge is Chair of the Department of Pharmacology at UT Health San Antonio, and among the things his lab is currently studying is schizophrenia. The current treatments ease some symptoms for some people, but Lodge thinks they can do better.
To do that, they must begin at the beginning.
Professor and Chair of Pharmacology
The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio
"What we want to do is go back, understand pathology, what's actually going wrong, and then try and target that specifically, and we think by doing that, we'll come up with truly novel and better therapeutic approaches," Lodge said.
To do that, they need to study rats.
"You can't produce schizophrenia in a rat," Lodge said, "but what you can do is you can give certain treatments that produce the same brain alterations that you see in human patients, and then you can get in and see if you can manipulate those brain circuits."
There’s a particular type of neuron, cells called parvalbumin (PV) cells, that inhibits the activity of other neurons in the brain. There appear to be fewer of these cells in the postmortem brains of people with schizophrenia. Theoretically, without enough PV cells in a person's brain to inhibit other neurons, the other cells become too active.
"So what we want to do is reduce that activity," Lodge said.
"So what we've got is a drug that targets a specific inhibitory receptor in a specific part of the brain," Lodge continued. "When we give that drug, it seems to reverse everything that looks like schizophrenia in an animal model."
That drug is now in trials.
Lodge's hope for this medication and all others that come out of his lab is that they’ll better treat disease, improving quality of life, and will have fewer side effects than earlier medications.
"That's exactly what we're looking for," Lodge concluded.
Science & Medicine is a collaboration between TPR and The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio that explores how scientific discovery in San Antonio advances the way medicine is practiced everywhere.
