Research Update

Our mission and goal, to understand the basic mechanisms of serious mental illness, has again guided us into new areas of research and to new insights. We have found evidence of new genes implicated in the cause of schizophrenia and involved in brain functions related to cognition and emotion and we have begun to explore how genes interact with each other and with the environment to individualize risk for these conditions. We are working now with over 20 genes related to schizophrenia. One of the key developments in our research over the past year has been the emergence of some targets for the development of novel therapeutics. We have discovered a new schizophrenia susceptibility gene, KCNH2, which represents the first clear target for the development of novel treatments. Just in this past year, for example, we published the first extensive statistical analysis of how schizophrenia genes may vary in their risk effects based on different genetic background (Nicodemus et al Hum Gen 2006), the first studies of schizophrenia genes interacting in effecting gene expression in brain (Lipska et al Hum Mol Genetics 2006a, Lipska et al Hum Mol Gen 2006 b); the first evidence that the mechanism of genetic association of NRG1 with schizophrenia involves a novel isoform of the gene in human brain (Law et al PNAS 2006), and the first evidence that MAOA may be linked to mood and impulse control because it effects critical mood regulatory neural networks (Meyer-Lindenberg et al PNAS 2006).

The main purpose of everything we do is to change the lives of sick people. We have often said that finding genes for mental illness, the first objective clues to the causes of these disorders, should offer the opportunity for the discovery of novel targets for better therapeutics. We are pursuing five new leads and we hope that within the coming year we will start at least two clinical trials of drugs never before used to treat psychiatric disorders.