Christo­pher Pryce

Mouse mod­els of stress-relat­ed emo­tion­al patholo­gies to under­stand neur­al cir­cuit­ry and treatment

Abstract

Stress-relat­ed neu­ropsy­chi­atric dis­or­ders present with trans­di­ag­nos­tic patholo­gies of aver­sion and/​or reward pro­cess­ing. In male mice, chron­ic social stress (CSS) leads to increased aver­sion sen­si­tiv­i­ty and decreased reward sen­si­tiv­i­ty, as mea­sured in trans­la­tion­al behav­iour­al tests. Using var­i­ous neu­roimag­ing meth­ods (bulk fibre pho­tom­e­try, MRI), the CSS-induced changes in neur­al cir­cuit­ry that under­lie the behav­iour­al changes can be iden­ti­fied. Ex vivo meth­ods (e.g. laser cap­ture microdis­sec­tion and RNA-Seq) then allow for mol­e­c­u­lar tar­get dis­cov­ery, fol­lowed by phar­ma­co­log­i­cal val­i­da­tion. Exam­ples of phar­ma­co­log­i­cal mech­a­nisms val­i­dat­ed in the mod­els and now being stud­ied in clin­i­cal tri­als will also be presented.

Biog­ra­phy

Christo­pher Pryce, Pro­fes­sor for Neu­ro­bi­ol­o­gy and Bio­log­i­cal Psy­chi­a­try, Med­ical Fac­ul­ty on Uni­ver­si­ty of Zurich since 2018, he leads the Pre­clin­i­cal Lab­o­ra­to­ry for Trans­la­tion­al Research into Affec­tive Dis­or­ders with­in the Depart­ment of Psy­chi­a­try at the Psy­chi­atric Hos­pi­tal at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Zurich. Along his sci­en­tif­ic career he spe­cial­ized in ani­mal mod­els for emo­tion­al-moti­va­tion­al states in affec­tive dis­or­ders, patho­phys­i­o­log­i­cal process­es under­ly­ing psy­chopathol­o­gy, pre­clin­i­cal dis­cov­ery and val­i­da­tion of drug tar­gets for emo­tion­al symp­toms and trans­la­tion­al research in the affec­tive disorders.