Guest speaker Femke de Vrij

Host: Maarten Kole

Speaker: Femke de Vrij, Erasmus MC Rotterdam

Title: Using hiPSCs to model schizophrenia and related neuropsychiatric disorders.

Abstract

Recent developments in human induced pluripotent stem cell (hiPSC) technology offer the unique opportunity to implement lineage-specific human cellular models suitable for uncovering disease-relevant biology and facilitate drug development. We have established a variety of hiPSC models for obtaining defined brain cell types to study the underlying mechanisms of psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders. Comparison of control and diseased human brain cells and 3D organoids allows us to study and manipulate human neurobiological mechanisms, focusing on genetic candidate variants for neuropsychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia.