PASADENA, Calif.--Several landmark discoveries over the past two years have linked the immune system with schizophrenia and also with autism. These findings provide support for a new mouse model of mental illness in which the activation of a pregnant mother's immune system alters the brain development and behavior of her offspring.
In epidemiological studies, researchers have found that viral infection in a pregnant woman during certain critical periods of gestation increases the risk for schizophrenia or autism in her offspring. Moreover, there is new evidence for an altered immune state in the brains of patients with these illnesses.
In modeling this phenomenon in mice, Paul Patterson and his colleagues have found that giving a mother a flu infection midway through her pregnancy leads to striking behavioral abnormalities in her offspring. Activation of the mother's immune system also causes abnormalities in brain development that resemble those seen in patients with schizophrenia and autism. This mouse model therefore allows researchers to study the mechanism through which the mother's immune system alters fetal brain development.
On Wednesday, May 17, Patterson, the Anne P. and Benjamin F. Biaggini Professor of Biological Sciences at the California Institute of Technology, will discuss this research and how it could someday lead to new ways to treat--and possibly prevent--schizophrenia and autism. His talk, "Can One Make a Mouse Model of Mental Illness, and Why Try?" is the last program of the Winter/Spring 2006 Earnest C. Watson Lecture Series.
The talk will be presented at 8 p.m. in Beckman Auditorium, 332 S. Michigan Avenue, south of Del Mar Boulevard, on the Caltech campus in Pasadena. Seating is available on a free, no-ticket-required, first-come, first-served basis.
Caltech has offered the Watson Lecture Series since 1922, when it was conceived by the late Caltech physicist Earnest Watson as a way to explain science to the local community.
For more information, call 1(888) 2CALTECH (1-888-222-5832) or (626) 395-4652.
