BRAIN SCIENTISTS at the University of Edinburgh have successfully developed a method to clone the cerebral tissue of patients suffering from mental illnesses.

By converting a sample of a patient’s skin cells to stem cells and subsequently to brain cells, researchers at the university’s Centre for Regenerative Medicine (CRM) are now hoping that these newly created brain tissues will pave the way to enhancing the treatment of illnesses such as schizophrenia, depression and multiple sclerosis.

The project is part of the first ever series of experiments where scientists attempt to replicate brain cells from a living patient, as opposed to extracting donated cells after an autopsy had been conducted.

CRM director, Professor Charles Ffrench-Constant explained to The Guardian that, “essentially we are turning a person’s skin cells into brain cells. We are making cells that were previously inaccessible. And we could do that in future for the liver, the heart and other organs on which it is very difficult to carry out biopsies”.

Professor Ffrench-Constant is leading one particular experiment examining the neurones taken from sufferers of multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease and motor neurone disease.

A separate experiment, led by Professor Andrew Macintosh of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital in collaboration with the CRM, will analyse the neurones of patients with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.

Macintosh, speaking to The Guardian said, “once we have assembled these [cloned brain cells] we look at standard psychological medicines, such as lithium, to see how they affect these cells in the laboratory. After that we can start to screen new medicines”.

He added that, “our lines of brain cells would become testing platforms for new drugs”.

Particularly for patients suffering from multiple sclerosis, these ground-breaking experiments will offer vital new insights into the degenerative symptoms which can manifest themselves at differing rates; some patients live for many years with ailment, whilst other patients’ conditions degenerate rapidly.

Ffrench-Constant, leader of the investigation into neurones cloned from multiple sclerosis patients, stated that “we will take skin samples from MS patients whose condition has progressed quickly and others in whom it is not changing very much”. The CRM director also added that through the analysis of these artificially created neurones a treatment may be found for multiple sclerosis.

Almost two decades after the successful cloning of Dolly the sheep, the same departments at the University of Edinburgh may now be able to offer insights which will introduce a variety of new treatments for debilitating mental illnesses.