Schizophrenia is a chronic mental disorder that affects approximately 50 million people worldwide. It is an illness that doesn’t allow people who suffer from it to have a normal life. Fortunately, most used treatments nowadays, the second-generation antipsychotic drugs, can suppress the symptomatology without neurological side effects Nevertheless, they have a dark side too; patients under these drugs treatment show in some cases abnormal gain weight, hyperglycemia, and dyslipidemia and the reasons for these alterations are still very poorly understood.

One of the research lines in which the ITN-TREATMENT researchers are involved is precisely related to the searching for these mechanisms that underlie the metabolic disorders mentioned above. For instance, we can highlight the study led by Dr. Angela Valverde at the IIB-UAM, which shows one of the metabolic pathways that is modified by treatment with one of these drugs (olanzapine) and how that modification is the reason, at least in part, for insulin resistance in hepatocytes induced by this drug. By knowing the mechanisms that operate in the generation of the unwanted side effects of these drugs, we will be laying the basis to avoid them in the future.