Lot de Witte

Speaker

Lot de Witte, Associate Professor Radboud UMC

The role of microglia in psychiatric diseases: Inflammatory hot heads? Shitty pruners? Lazy garbage guys? Or valuable plastic surgeons?

Abstract

Understanding the pathophysiology of psychiatric diseases is a major challenge, as the brain is our most complex organ, pathologic markers and strong genetic risk factors are absent, and disease modeling of psychiatric symptoms is complicated. In our group we study the role of microglia in psychiatric diseases, such as schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, and autism. I will share our results and discuss how our hypotheses on the role of microglia have shifted and are still evolving, also because the role of microglia in the healthy, developing and aged brain is getting more and more clear. I will share with you our new iPSC-based platforms to study microglia-neuron interactions, and would love to discuss how this and other new methods can bring us further in understanding the role of microglia in psychiatric diseases.