Cross-Species Neurophysiological Biomarkers of Attentional Dysfunction in Schizophrenia: Bridging the Translational Gap

There has been a fundamental failure to translate preclinically-supported compounds into novel psychiatric treatments. That failure has been driven by a lack of suitable animal models of disease with concomitant biomarkers of neural-circuit function across species (Young and Geyer, 2015). Electroencephalographic (EEG) biomarkers of behavioral performance are direct assays of neural system functioning with compelling opportunity for cross-species translation (Featherstone et al, 2015). The recently developed 5-choice continuous performance test (5C-CPT) provides an example for integrating behavioral outcomes and neurophysiological biomarkers. Designed to quantify cognitive control (attention) and response inhibition in rodents and humans, the 5C-CPT has demonstrable cross-species validity including; (a) 36？h sleep deprivation-induced deficits; (b) amphetamine-induced improvement; (c) parietal requirement for performance from human fMRI and rodent lesion studies; and (d) vigilance decrement observations across time (Cope and Young, 2017). Importantly, this task is also clinically sensitive as patients with schizophrenia exhibit deficient performance (Young et al, 2017)