14 DAY TRIAL // A new research carried out by Michael Kaplitt of the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City and colleagues, showed that gene therapy delivered to a certain part of the brain could reverse the symptoms of depression in mice.
This could open the way to a new approach of treating severe cases of depression in humans, that do not respond to other medications, and it would also mean that a psychiatric condition can be treated with gene therapy.
Many researchers believe that depression could be caused by a poor signaling of the neurotransmitter serotonin, and this is why, for this study, the team used a virus to deliver an extra dose of the gene p11 to the adult mouse brain.
This gene expresses a protein that is believed to bind serotonin receptor molecules and bring them to the surface of the cell, so that they can receive signals from the other cells.
A lack of p11 has been shown to lead to depression in humans, so the team first tested to see if the same phenomenon occurs in mice too.
After proving that mice without the p11 gene were depressed, the scientists injected viruses containing the gene, directly into their nucleus accumbens, and found that the depression symptoms were reversed.
René Hen, a neuroscientist who studies depression at Columbia University in New York, admits that these findings are rather interesting but “animal models of depression are very imperfect.”
Also, as this is a very invasive treatment, even if it would be approved in humans, it should only be used after all the other alternatives have proved ineffective.
When told that the proposal to do the same in humans sounds a bit radical, Kaplitt replies that a similar procedure has already been used to deliver genes to the brains of people with Parkinson's disease.
“We're already doing a primate study to support a potential human trial, so this is moving ahead very rapidly,” he says, according to the NewScientist.
“Obviously, we have to be careful and do this right, to make sure we don't set the field back dramatically by moving too quickly.”
This research was published in Science Translational Medicine, Nature reports.