Bipolar disorder and lithium-induced gene expression in two peripheral cell models

Bipolar disorder is a severe and heritable psychiatric disorder and affects up to 1% of the population worldwide. Lithium is recommended as first-line treatment for the maintenance treatment of bipolar-affective disorder in current guidelines, its molecular modes of action are however poorly understood. Cell models derived from bipolar patients could prove useful to gain more insight in the molecular mechanisms of bipolar disorder and the common pharmacological treatments. As primary neuronal cell lines cannot be easily derived from patients, peripheral cell models should be evaluated in their usefulness to study pathomechanisms and the mode of action of medication as well as in regard to develop biomarkers for diagnosis and treatment response. Here, we examined the global transcriptional response of lympho- and fibroblast cell lines derived from 10 bipolar disorder patients and 11 unaffected controls to 1 mM LiCl2.