Mark is working on a project in the Ryan/Doucette Behavioural Neuroscience Lab aimed at developing a novel animal model of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a disease that affects millions of people worldwide yet relatively little is known about it. One way of studying diseases like schizophrenia is to use an animal “model”, which is an animal species or strain that 
shows, or can be made to show, symptoms of the disease. Animal models of schizophrenia are useful tools for researching the possible origins of the disease and how the disease progresses, and for testing potential treatments. The Ryan/Doucette lab at UPEI is working on developing novel animal models of schizophrenia to study development and treatment of the disease under a variety of conditions.
Schizophrenia is a debilitating neurological disorder with a number of characteristic symptoms. One common negative symptom seen in humans with the disease is social withdrawal, where the individual withdraws from social contact. This symptom can also be readily observed in rats, thus making it an ideal behaviour to observe when evaluating whether an animal model of schizophrenia was produced successfully. Other ways to test for schizophrenia are to look for physical differences in the brain, for example decreases in the volume of a part of the brain called the hippocampus. In this research, Mark carried out procedures on early stages of rats to overactivate different chemical pathways of the developing rat to try to induce schizophrenia, thereby producing an animal model that could be used to study the disease or test different treatments. He tested his model by determining whether the model rats showed behavioural (social withdrawal) or physical (brain structure) changes that were consistent with schizophrenia.
Student Research