NImPsy
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Neural Circuits and Immunity in Psychosis
IRAS ID
329202
Contact name
Zaiba Khan
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Barnet, Enfield Haringey Mental Health Trust
Duration of Study in the UK
4 years, 11 months, 30 days
Research summary
The cause of psychosis remains a mystery, which is a major barrier to developing better treatments. Recently, new evidence has emerged suggesting that psychosis might be an autoimmune disease. However, despite consistent and compelling evidence that there are immune changes associated with psychosis, it has not been demonstrated that these are the cause of psychosis symptoms, rather than a result of other underlying brain dysfunction.
A challenge to demonstrating causality is lack of detailed knowledge about the changes in immune function on the level of individual cell populations. With more detailed mapping of immune changes, we could make informed hypotheses about potential causes of immune dysregulation, seek further evidence in larger patient samples and test these hypotheses in cell or animal models. We will take matched CSF and blood samples from people experiencing psychosis and people without psychosis. Collecting CSF will give us most information about immune processes in the brain, and paired blood samples can contextualise within globally altered immune function.
By identifying potentially causal processes, we can develop methods to induce analogous conditions in mice, to see if they develop psychosis-like behaviour. We plan to test the effects of this using a mouse model of hallucinations developed in our lab, and we would expect that immune dysfunction would increase hallucination-like perception in our mouse model.
We have already shown that an analogous measure of hallucination-like perception in humans is associated with increased everyday hallucinatory perception. This research also aims to further validate this model as a way of measuring hallucination-like symptoms in mice by seeing if hallucination-like perception is increased in patients with psychosis.
Such experiments could demonstrate a causal role for immune dysregulation in psychosis. This is a crucial step in justifying and planning treatments for psychosis which target the immune system.
REC name
South Central - Oxford C Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
23/SC/0198
Date of REC Opinion
14 Aug 2023
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion