article: The Insanity Virus

[jan251]

http://discovermagazine.com/2010/jun/03-the-insanity-virus (this article is old, from 2010)

 

Schizophrenia has long been blamed on bad genes or even bad parents. Wrong, says a growing group of psychiatrists. The real culprit, they claim, is a virus that lives entwined in every person's DNA.

 

Viruses like influenza or measles kill cells when they infect them. But when retroviruses like HIV infect a cell, they often let the cell live and splice their genes into its DNA. When the cell divides, both of its progeny carry the retrovirus’s genetic code in their DNA.

 

Torrey and Yolken hope to add a new, more hopeful chapter to this story. Yolken’s wife, Faith Dickerson, is a clinical psychologist at Sheppard Pratt Health System in Baltimore. She is running a clinical trial to examine whether adding an anti-infective agent called artemisinin to the drugs that patients are already taking can lessen the symptoms of schizophrenia. The drug would hit HERV-W indirectly by tamping down the infections that awaken it. “If we can treat the toxoplasmosis,” Torrey says, “presumably we can get a better outcome than by treating [neurotransmitter] abnormalities that have occurred 14 steps down the line, which is what we’re doing now.”

 

Looking ahead, better prenatal care or vaccinations could prevent the first, early infections that put some people on a path to schizophrenia. For high-risk babies who do get sick, early treatment might prevent psychosis from developing two decades later. Recent work by Urs Meyer, the neuroimmunologist, and his colleague Joram Feldon at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology drives this point home. When they injected pregnant mice with RNA molecules mimicking viral infections, the pups grew up to resemble schizophrenic adults. The animals’ memory and learning were impaired, they overreacted to startling noises, and their brain atrophied. But this March, Meyer and Feldon reported that treating the baby mice with antipsychotic drugs prevented them from developing some of these abnormalities as adults.

Perron has founded a biotech start-up —GeNeuro, in Geneva, Switzerland—to develop treatments targeting HERV-W. The company has created an antibody that neutralizes a primary viral protein, and it works in lab mice with MS. “We have terrific effects,” Perron says. “In animals that have demyelinating brain lesions induced by these HERV envelope proteins, we see a dramatic stop to this process when we inject this antibody.” He is scheduled to begin a Phase 1 clinical trial in people with MS near the end of this year. A clinical trial with schizophrenics might follow in 2011.

phase 2 clinical trial http://www.servier.com/content/geneuro-announces-launch-phase-iib-proof-concept-study-gnbac1-multiple-sclerosis-and-servier

https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02782858 (news article 2015)

 

Really interesting stuff, though I wish science moved a little bit faster!

Edited November 6, 2016 by jan251