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UCLA assistant professor Roel Ophoff shares a laugh with Katherine Zartman. Zartman is a represen

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UCLA assistant professor Roel Ophoff talks to Sascha Rigdon about his research

Katherine Zartman waited excitedly in the lobby of the Gonda (Golschmied) Neuroscience and Genetic Reserach Center building early Friday morning. In a few minutes, she would meet a UCLA researcher working on several psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia – a disease that critically affected her son Peter nearly 15 years ago.

“This is a very special opportunity,” Zartman said of the visit.

After battling schizophrenia for several years, Peter began to improve after taking clozapine, an experimental drug to treat schizophrenia in 1987. Peter’s family and doctors were so excited by his recovery they did not realize he was slipping into an anxiety attack that would culminate in his suicide.

On what would have been Peter’s 40th birthday, his family and several of his neighbors and close friends pitched in to help fund a $30,000 grant for schizophrenia research from the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression. NARSAD is the largest donor-supported funder of research into severe psychiatric disorders.

Roel Ophoff, an assistant professor in human genetics at UCLA, was the recipient of the grant.

The grant started off as a letter from Peter’s close friend, Sascha Bensinger, asking other friends and family members to donate money to fund schizophrenia research.

After spending a happy childhood with Peter, who his mother describes as bright, well-adjusted and well-liked, Bensinger said she didn’t know how to deal with Peter’s sickness and felt she had to honor his memory in a positive way.

Because the grant was a brain-child of Bensinger, who lives in Los Angeles, Katherine Zartman said she wanted to pick a researcher that was nearby so she could continue to monitor and observe the progress.

With three kids of his own, Ophoff said it is difficult for him to imagine what Katherine Zartman went through.

“You look at real people, you see it has an effect on the real world,” Ophoff said.

Schizophrenia affects more than two million adult Americans – including 35 percent of the homeless on the city streets – and costs the nation over $32.5 billion annually, according to NARSAD.

Ophoff described his research to Katherine and Bensinger while giving them a tour of his lab.

Researchers have already associated neurological characteristics with a specific region on chromosome eight.

After investigating, Ophoff realized most people suffering from schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and Tourette’s Syndrome have the same mutation – an inversion of a large chunk of the DNA sequence – on this chromosome.

However, not everyone with this inversion will necessarily develop a neurological condition due to the determining role played by external factors and the environment.

Ophoff has hypothesized that similar chromosomal rearrangements are common throughout the entire human genome, but have never been explained or scrutinized.

Although a link between these rearrangements and the disorders have yet to be established, Ophoff aims to increase knowledge on the genetic causes of neurological disorders.

“I hope that this knowledge will lead to a better understanding of how a disease can develop, and why some people are more susceptible to some diseases than others,” Ophoff said.

His research, which doesn’t focus explicitly on schizophrenia, but on the fundamental genetic origins of several neurological disorders, intrigued Katherine Zartman.

In a submission to NARSAD, Zartman wrote that funding research is something her family and other families who had to deal with mental illness can do. At the time, the Zartman family helped fund the work of Janet Finley, a schizophrenia researcher at the University of Pittsburgh.

“And I know Peter would like that!” she wrote. “Her work and the work of others like her is the hope of tomorrow for those now suffering with mental illness and those who will experience these tragic illnesses in the future.”