Australian Rotary Health

Mental Health Research Institute/University of Melbourne, VIC
Ian Scott PhD Scholarship
Mental Health 2007, 2008 and 2009
 

I completed a Bachelor of Science at Monash University majoring in Pharmacology and Psychology in 2004. During 2005 I completed honours, studying pregnancy pathologies (both pre-eclampsia and foetal growth restriction) at the Pregnancy Research Centre at the Royal Women’s Hospital.
 

Currently I am undertaking a PhD at the Mental Health Research Institute investigating the regulation of the muscarinic receptors in schizophrenia utilising postmortem human brain and cell culture, under the supervision of Prof Brian Dean and Dr. Elizabeth Scarr. I decided to study schizophrenia because I was interested in understanding the complex nature of the disorder and because of the need to develop better therapeutics to treat sufferers.
 

In 2006 I was awarded a grant-in-aid for a submitted abstract to the Australasian Society for Psychiatric Research. In 2007 I was awarded the Mental Health Research Institute’s Lady Zeidler student travel award for travel to the Society for Neuroscience conference in Washington DC.
 

In the future I wish to continue neuropsychiatric research involving human tissue, with a particular focus on developing pharmacological targets.
 

One in 100 people will develop schizophrenia; a debilitating psychiatric illness with no known cure.  Research into schizophrenia has been hindered by a lack of consistency in findings, largely because the illness has been treated as a specific disease when it is actually a group of syndromes.
 

While many symptoms of schizophrenia are alleviated by antipsychotic drugs, the most incapacitating group of symptoms - cognitive deficits - have no treatment.  Cognitive deficits involve the disruption of organisational thinking such as planning their day to complete important tasks or simply getting out of bed and going to work. Such disruption means that for most patients with schizophrenia, an independent, functional life is not possible. 
 
Tammie Money is investigating why there is a reduction in cortical muscarinic M1 receptors, a specific protein important in learning and memory, in the brains of people with schizophrenia. Tammie’s research project carried out at the Rebecca L Cooper laboratories, is using donated post mortem brain tissue of people with and without schizophrenia to investigate what is regulating the muscarinic receptors.
 

♦   Recently, the Rebecca L Cooper laboratories identified that one quarter of people with schizophrenia have a 75% reduction in the muscarinic M1 receptor in the brain (as reported in the Sunday Age 17th May, 2009 and as seen on 9am with David and Kim 29th May, 2009) 
♦   Tammie’s research showed that two proteins known to regulate the levels of muscarinic M1 receptor called the mu-opioid receptor and c-jun are not changed in this subgroup of people with schizophrenia.
 

This eliminates two possible factors of many that may be responsible for the reduction in muscarinic M1 receptors seen in the subgroup of people with schizophrenia.
 

Tammie’s research aims to make way for the development of drugs that will modify the reduction in muscarinic receptors and improve cognitive deficits associated with the illness.  Outcomes for people with schizophrenia will be significant. They will be able to become functioning community members, the burden on caregivers will be reduced and health care savings will be considerable.