Jean-Charles Schwartz

Jean Charles Schwartz is a French neurobiologist. He developed pitolisant, the first clinically approved antagonist for H3 receptors.^{[1] [2]}

Discovery

In the 1970s, the list of known neurotransmitters, formerly limited to acetylcholine and the catecholamines, began to grow rapidly. One of the newly added members, histamine, interested Schwartz.^[1] He noted the many similarities between histamine and the catecholamines, and was uncomfortable with one of the differences; namely, that the catecholamines had autoreceptors while histamine had none. Schwartz designed an experiment involving radioactive histamine located inside neurons on rat cerebral cortical tissue. When these tissues were stimulated, histamine was released. However, if nonradioactive histamine was added to the tissue, less radioactive histamine was released. This pointed towards the possibility of the presence of histamine autoreceptors. Schwartz performed additional tests, and then compared his results to the previously known H1 and H2 receptors. He found that neither of the known dose-response curves for these two receptors matched the ones he had found. Schwartz concluded he must have discovered a new histamine receptor, the H3 receptor.^[3]

References