Academic Biography

Dr. McCurdy is a postdoctoral fellow at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in the Clinical Genetics Research Program and Sick Kids Research Institute. During his undergraduate studies at the University of Guelph, he developed a keen interest in neuroscience before going on to complete a doctorate in developmental neurobiology at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia.

Background

Schizophrenia is a chronic psychiatric disorder characterized by abnormal perception of reality.  There are many clinical symptoms, such as disorganized speech and thinking, hallucinations, and delusions, which vary from person to person.  Schizophrenia affects up to one percent of people in their lifetime, with onset typically occurring in the late teens to early twenties.

Individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia have significant physical differences, relative to unaffected individuals, in neuron and brain structure and in the activity of neuron-to-neuron communication.  These differences are evident before the onset of schizophrenia.  Observations of the similarity and early onset of these differences have lead to the neurodevelopmental hypothesis: genetic and other heritable factors that alter early brain development can cause individuals with an increased risk of developing schizophrenia to develop the disorder.

Project Summary

Dr. McCurdy is investigating a specific form (the 1q22-linked familial subtype) of schizophrenia that runs in families. The participants in this study are members of Canadian families with this specific form of schizophrenia.  In this study, Dr. McCurdy is using a new method to obtain living neural cells from human participants. 

He will collect cell samples from the nose tissue (olfactory tissue) responsible for the sense of smell.  These samples include cells biologically destined to form various types of neural cells (neural progenitor cells). These cells will be analyzed for differences in gene expression between individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia and their unaffected family members.

Background and Relevance

The group of genes, of interest in this schizophrenia research, which children inherit from parents in this familial subtype of schizophrenia are involved in neural cell development and neuron-to-neuron communication.  The structure and function of the brain depends largely on the genetic and environmental influences on the neural progenitor cells.  Therefore the familial subtype schizophrenia that Dr. McCurdy is investigating has ample support for involvement in the neurodevelopmental causes of schizophrenia. 

The study represents an important next step in finding the systems of interacting genes that are changed in schizophrenia, particularly those that may be related to the development of nerve cells. This study is designed to help describe the genetic causes leading to schizophrenia.  Also, by studying neural progenitor cells this study will enhance the likelihood of identifying mechanisms involved in neurodevelopment.

Families with an inherited form of schizophrenia are involved in the study, which should improve the reliability and significance of the results.  By focusing on genetically similar participants, and focusing on a particular subtype of schizophrenia, Dr. McCurdy decreased the likelihood of obtaining inaccurate data from extraneous factors.