Psychiatric animal models are a challenge by their nature. Whether a drug is blocking tumor growth in a rodent is easy enough to measure, although still hard to translate. But how does one figure out what a mouse is thinking? Actually, one doesn’t. There is “no way in heck I’m going to claim that I can model a thought disorder in rodents, so forget about that,” Bita Moghaddam told her audience at the opening keynote of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ECNP) annual conference this weekend. But other aspects of mental disorders, she argued, can be usefully modeled.
“Epilepsy is really a classical neurological disorder,” Lars Pinborg told the audience at the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ECNP) annual conference on Sunday. “Or is it?” Pinborg, of Rigshospitalet's The Neuroscience Center in Denmark, was chairing a session dedicated to an alternative hypothesis, summed up in the session title: “Is epilepsy a psychiatric disorder?”
To determine if long noncoding RNA (lncRNA) LINC01018 has a tumor-suppressing role in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), scientists at the Theodor Bilharz Research Institute and the American University in Cairo developed a therapeutic modality to treat mice with experimental disease.
Preclinical data on a novel T-cell therapy based on engineered autologous regulatory T cells (GNTI-122, EngTregs) for the potential treatment of type 1 diabetes (T1D) were presented by Gentibio Inc.
Increasing evidence exists regarding estrogen receptor β (ERβ) playing a protective role in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and its loss resulting in progressive neural cell body degeneration.
Researchers from Meiragtx Ltd. presented preclinical data on a new and optimized gene therapy based on a mini ATP7B gene for the potential treatment of Wilson’s disease (WD), a rare (1:30,000) autosomal recessive genetic disease caused by loss-of-function mutations in ATP7B, leading to a pathologically high amount of copper in the liver and brain.
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