Schizophrenia Model

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by both positive and negative symptoms that impair the mental function of the affected individual. Positive symptoms typically include paranoia, hallucinations and delusions, and are usually treatable. Negative symptoms include asociality and cognitive impairment and, at this point, are largely untreatable with drug therapy. As such, there is a clear clinically unmet need for medications that are active and effective on the negative symptoms of schizophrenia.

Our schizophrenia model is a fully validated in vivo animal model with both positive and negative symptoms and cognitive deficits, facilitating the development of drugs for either symptom category.

Positive Symptoms
Negative Symptoms

Prepulse inhibition of startle is a neurophysiological and behavioral measure of sensorimotor gating. A weaker prestimulus (prepulse) inhibits the reaction of an animal to a subsequent strong startling stimulus (pulse). Abnormal sensory inhibition may reflect a deficit in processing incoming sensory information. Such deficits are often observed in patients suffering from illnesses like schizophrenia.

Charles River uses a schizophrenia model of PCP-induced impairment of Prepulse Inhibition (PPI) of startle. An antipsychotic drug is typically capable of partly reversing the PPI impairment.

The key cognitive tests for efficacy of a substance on negative schizophrenia symptoms are the Morris Water Maze (MWM) and the Novel Object Recognition (NOR) test, in which PCP-induced cognitive decline in rats is reversed with an antipsychotic.