A new study, led by USC Mark and Mary Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute (Stevens INI), will explore structural alterations in the brains of people with bipolar disorder (BD), a chronic mental illness with one of the highest rates of attempted suicide — and for which no biological tools currently exist to guide diagnosis or treatment. The goal is to transform researchers’ understanding of the disease in the hopes of developing more effective treatments. Christopher R.K. Ching, PhD, assistant professor of research neurology at the Stevens INI, part of the Keck School of Medicine of USC, will lead a global network of psychiatric researchers in collaboration with Matthew Kempton, PhD, of King’s College London. The NIH-funded project supports efforts by the Enhancing Neuro Imaging Genetics through Meta-Analysis (ENIGMA) Consortium’s Bipolar Disorder Working Group (ENIGMA-BD), which Ching chairs. The team will use a large-scale analysis approach called voxel-based morphometry (VBM), which allows scientists to map subtle structural alterations across the entire brain. Unlike other neuroimaging methods that tend to average features across larger predefined brain regions, this technique enables precise, fine-resolution mapping of the emotion and reward processing centers affected in BD and other regions like the cerebellum often overlooked in prior studies. 

In two new papers, researchers from The Jackson Laboratory (JAX) report the successful use of two approaches -- gene therapy and bone marrow transplantation – to alleviate symptoms of multiple sulfatase deficiency (MSD), an ultra-rare genetic disease with no cure. The studies, carried out in mice, not only offer new hope to children with MSD and their families but can also help researchers better understand common diseases with related genetic mutations.

A new way to grow T cells in the lab enables them to live longer and better destroy cancer cells in a mouse model of melanoma compared to those grown in traditional growth media. The findings have the potential to greatly improve the effectiveness of cancer immunotherapies that involve taking T cells from a patient and growing them to enormous numbers in the lab before reinfusing them back into the body.