The Mission
“I learned how it is possible to crack incredibly complex problems by looking at what is happening at the cellular level. This approach had already completely transformed immunology, cancer biology and developmental biology. That makes me curious if we can also apply this to the brain.”
Karl Deisseroth, Stanford University
Urgency and Purpose of the Research
We still know very little about the underlying biological mechanisms of psychiatric disorders. The molecular and cellular changes that cause psychiatric symptoms, such as low mood, psychosis or anxiety, are therefore still unknown. Many of these psychiatric symptoms also occur in neurological syndromes, such as depression in Alzheimer's disease and multiple sclerosis. As a result, they are not specific to a single condition.
Treatments such as psychotherapy and/or medication can help, but these treatments are not effective for everyone. It often takes a long time to find the right treatment, and medication can come with many side effects. In recent decades, only a limited number of new medicines have come onto the market.
Psychiatric symptoms are not caused by structural changes that you can see with a normal microscope, as in Alzheimer's disease. We focus on molecular changes at the smallest level of the connection points within neuronal networks. It is not yet known what changed there. We will delineate at cellular and molecular levels how these structures differs from person to person and whether this can be linked to their psychiatric symptoms.
Establishment of a national institute
In the Institute for Chemical Neurosciences (iCNS) research is carried out on the human brain tissue of the Netherlands Brain Bank of neuropsychiatric patients, collected by the Netherlands Brain Bank (NBB) in the context of the earlier NBB-PSY cohort and the donor data from the Netherlands Neurogenetics Database.
In iCNS, state-of-the-art molecular techniques are applied to the human brain tissue and combined with artificial intelligence of all patient data. This makes it possible, for the first time, to link specific molecular changes in certain brain regions to specific psychiatric symptoms. Subsequently, molecular changes will be characterized in detail in the brain tissue, from the functional level to model systems (including stem cells and brain organoids) with excellent chemical methods.
Neurobiologists, chemists, psychiatrists, data scientists and patient representatives in the Netherlands work closely together in the national iCNS consortium to advance the research on psychiatric symptoms. In addition, we aim to train a new generation of young scientists who will continue these modern and multidisciplinary approaches. We will combine the clinical and neuropathological information from the donors of the Netherlands Brain Bank with advanced techniques to analyse the tissue, in order to gain a better understanding of the interindividual disease processes. This is unique, because almost no other brain bank in the world has this rich information available from brain donors.
New necessary insights
The research is expected to lead to new insights into the mechanisms of brain diseases. The aim is to develop a "brain atlas" of psychiatric symptoms that will hopefully contribute to a better understanding of both the onset and the individual course of the disease in different neuropsychiatric disorders. This fundamental understanding is necessary to develop innovative approaches to diagnosis and prognosis, and ultimately to better treatment of psychiatric syndromes.