Christopher M. Bartley, MD, PhD
Chief, Translational Immunopsychiatry Unit (TIU)
National Institute of Mental Health
Host(s): Joseph Gogos (Faculty) and Steven Kushner (Faculty)
Deep antibody repertoire mapping in psychotic spectrum disorders
The causes of psychosis are diverse. However, a subset of individuals suffering from a psychotic spectrum disorder (PSD) likely have an immune-mediated illness. Notably, systemic autoimmunity is more prevalent in PSDs than in healthy controls, autoimmunity and infection synergistically increase the risk of schizophrenia, schizophrenia genetic risk loci preferentially map to antibody-producing B cell gene enhancer regions, up to a third of individuals with PSDs have unclassified autoantibodies in their cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), and about 10% of individuals with PSDs ectopically produce antibodies in their CSF. Yet, autoantibodies that are diagnostic of autoimmune encephalitis are largely absent from individuals with a primary psychosis spectrum diagnosis. Therefore, the antigenic targets of ectopic antibodies in PSDs have remained largely unknown because legacy antibody discovery methods are sensitive to only a fraction of the universe of potential anti-neural autoantibodies. This talk will present next-generation antibody repertoire mapping methods that my lab has used to identify novel, disease-associated autoantibodies in the CSF of individuals with atypical and typical psychotic spectrum disorders. The talk will then explore how patient-derived anti-neural antibodies can be repurposed as experimental tools.
Relevant Publications:
Detection of high-risk paraneoplastic antibodies against TRIM9 and TRIM67 proteins
Human - derived monoclonal autoantibodies as interrogators of cellular proteotypes in the brain
Please contact [email protected] with any questions.
This event will be in-person only, open to Columbia University Affiliates
Speaker Location: Jerome L. Greene Science Center, 9th Floor Lecture Hall
Tuesdays@10 is a signature Zuckerman Institute initiative that aims to expose researchers at all levels to high-quality science and stimulate scientific discourse. The speakers featured in this series represent various fields and techniques in neuroscience, and include invited guests of the Columbia Neuroscience Seminars, the Zuckerman Institute's Local Circuits Affiliates Program, and other special seminar series through a combined, collaborative effort of one or more of the following: Columbia's Zuckerman Institute, the Center for Precision Psychiatry, the Department of Neuroscience, the Doctoral Program in Neurobiology and Behavior and the Columbia Translational Neuroscience Initiative, and with support from the Kavli Institute for Brain Science.
More information and a full schedule can be found here.