The rewards of translational work

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To bring bench work to bedside there has to be an element of translation. Researchers and clinicians need to collaborate to interpret the findings found in mice and how they can relate to the human patient. Camilla Bellone and Marie Schaer explain just how they are achieving this in the NCCR-Synapsy autism spectrum disorder project.

Camilla Bellone explores the use of animal models in social paradigms, to look at the causality between circuitry and mechanism and behaviour. Her recent work looks at dopaminergic neurons and the dysfunction in the reward system that shows social impairments in mice. Indeed, these impairments can be detected as structural changes in the reward system in human pre-schoolers.

Using a range of techniques, from MRI and EEG, and eye-tracking Marie Schaer has been able to explore the neural networks involved in social interaction and stimuli.

The reciprocal relationship between Camilla’s and Marie’s research projects have been focused on the social motivation hypothesis, but not everything is social in ASD.

Camilla and Marie are state of the art speakers and will be at the ESCAP 2019 congress in Vienna. They will present in further detail their research.

Here, they explain a little of their findings and how they work in this NCCR-Synapsy translation project (Eng.) :

Author : ESCAP online

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