Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Psychiatric disorders are characterized by symptoms such as depression (a state of low mood)and psychosis (a loss of contact with reality). Current medications have numerous side-effects and are not effective in treating a large number of patients. Thus there is a great need for new and better treatments for these symptoms. Possible targets for new drugs include molecules that surround the DNA strand and affect gene expression (the way DNA exerts its effect on the cellular and organismal levels). These molecules are part of what is called the epigenome, and the study of these molecules is called epigenetics. We wish to test the efficacy of a new class of drugs, epigenetic drugs on their ability to reduce depression and psychosis in rodent models. If these new drugs are effective in correcting behavioual abnormalities in these rodent models, they have a much higher chance of also being effective as drugs for treating related symptoms in humans. These experiments are just a first step in the drug development process, and will require more experiments and investigations before clinical trials in humans can be performed. It is hoped that these experiments will help in the development of a new therapeutic agent(s) for the treatment of diseases such as depression and schizophrenia.