Guest Editors
Byron Bitanihirwe
The University of Manchester, Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute
Byron Bitanihirwe is a global health scholar with an interest in translational psychiatry. Before Joining the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute at the University of Manchester, he conducted academic research/training in neurobiology and psychopathology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (Dr. Akira Sawa), Harvard Medical School (Dr. Tsung-Ung Woo) as well as ETH Zurich, as a doctoral student. He also held a Roche Post-Doctoral Fellowship. He currently serves as project co-lead with Dr. Paulo Lizano on the Manchester-Harvard Global Research Network, focusing on the choroid plexus in relation to psychiatric illness. He is also the principal investigator alongside Dr. Derrick Ssewanyana (University of Toronto) in relation to understanding the implications of antenatal corticosteroid exposure on neurocognitive outcomes in offspring.
Paulo Lizano
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Dr. Lizano received his B.S. in Biochemistry in 2006, PhD in Cell Biology and Molecular Medicine in 2011, and MD in 2013 from Rutgers University. He completed a four-year psychiatry research track residency at the Harvard Longwood Program in 2017, and a two-year UCNS accredited Neuropsychiatry Neurology Fellowship at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in 2019. He became an Assistant Professor in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School in 2020 and the Division Chief of Translational Neuroscience and Director of the ASPIRE first episode psychosis clinic at BIDMC in 2021. Dr. Lizano is also a Deputy Editor at the Harvard Review of Psychiatry (since 2018) and Associate Editor for Schizophrenia Research (since 2016). These experiences led Dr. Lizano to integrate basic neuroscience and clinical research and combine these two disparate research areas to translate findings more rapidly to patients.
Jaleel Miyan
The University of Manchester
Dr. Miyan graduated from the University of Sussex with a degree in Biological Sciences, majoring in Neurobiology in 1978, and a PhD in neurobiology from the University of Glasgow in 1982. He was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in 1986, which he held until 1996, initially at Edinburgh and then Manchester. He has been a senior lecturer in Neuroscience at Manchester since that time. His research has focused on the role of CSF in cortical development and how this can and does go wrong in different neurological conditions, initially focusing on hydrocephalus. His identification of the unique cerebral folate system has led to the development of a treatment that reduces the risk of hydrocephalus which he is currently translating into human trials.
Collection Overview
The choroid plexus (CP) is a highly vascularised ‘frondlike’ structure lining the four ventricles in the brain. Beyond playing a central role in cerebrospinal fluid, (CSF) production—which facilitates nutrient transport and removes metabolic waste from the brain—a growing body of empirical evidence has linked the CP to physiological and neurobiological processes, including inflammation, leukocyte trafficking, circadian rhythm, cognition as well as modulation of the gut brain-axis. In recent years, advances in neuroimaging and molecular biology techniques alongside increasingly sophisticated animal models have played an integral role in understanding how the CP–CSF system evolves during brain development. In this context, anomalies in the CP-CSF system have been linked to various brain disorders ranging from hydrocephalus and cerebral folate deficiency to schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease.
Because the CP is situated deep within the brain, it remains one of the most difficult neuroanatomical structures to view and investigate in cellular neurobiology. Just as difficult is the study of the physiology of the CSF. It is often challenging to discern which elements of the CP-CSF system directly contribute to brain disease. In this collection, we present a variety of experimental models, methodologies, and techniques for studying cellular processes, molecular events, and segmentation of the CP in relation to neurodevelopment and psychiatric illness. A similar emphasis is also placed on developmental changes of CSF in terms of cerebral cortex maturation and neurological deficits.
Articles
Targeted Knockdown of Genes in the Choroid Plexus
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Cited by 2
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2023
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Yuwen Yang*1, Chenxing Qi*1, Lanxin Hu1, Cheng Zheng1, Xuhang Li1, Wu Zheng1, Yiyun Weng2, Haiyan Lin3,4
1State Key Laboratory of Ophthalmology, Optometry and Visual Science, Eye Hospital, Wenzhou Medical University, 2Department of Neurology, the First Affiliated Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University, 3Rehabilitation Medicine Center, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University, 4Integrative & Optimized Medicine Research Center, China-USA Institute for Acupuncture and Rehabilitation, Wenzhou Medical University
Manual Segmentation of the Human Choroid Plexus Using Brain MRI
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Cited by 14
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2023
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1Department of Psychiatry, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, 2Division of Translational Neuroscience, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, 3Huaxi MR Research Center (HMRRC), Department of Radiology, West China Hospital of Sichuan University, 4Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Jena University Hospital, 5AI in Medical Imaging, German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE), 6A. A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, 7Department of Radiology, Harvard Medical School, 8Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
Abstracts
Volumetric Segmentation Methodology of the Human Choroid Plexus in Neuroimaging
Victor Zeng1,
Paulo Lizano*1,
Chelsea Kiely1,
Martin Reuter2,
Deepthi Bannai1
1Department of Psychiatry, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, MA, USA,
2AI in Medical Imaging, German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE), Bonn, Germany