New Research Aims To Decode Genetic Roots Of Mental Illness

Neurodevelopmental and psychiatric diseases (NPD), such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism, and depression, have a negative impact on individuals, families, and society. Unfortunately, effective therapies are often lacking.

It's becoming increasingly obvious that genetic mutations in specific genes can raise the likelihood of getting NPD, and hundreds of those "risk genes" have been found to date, but their involvement in NPD remains unknown.

"Very little is known about the basic function of most of these genes, and what we do know often comes from work in cancer cell lines rather than brain cell types," said David Panchision, Chief of the Developmental and Genomic Neuroscience Research Branch at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), who spearheaded the SSPsyGene programme aiming to tackle this challenge.

"As such, we still don't have a clear understanding of how alterations in these genes may work individually or in combination to contribute to neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders."

To get to the bottom of this, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) initiated a consortium called SSPsyGene (sspsygene.ucsc.edu) in 2023, uniting research teams from renowned US universities with the joint goal of characterising the genetic origins of NPD, focusing on 250 selected high-risk genes.

Among the contributors are Jubao Duan, Endeavor Health (formerly NorthShore University Health System) and University of Chicago, USA and Zhiping Pang, Rutgers University, USA with their teams, who developed a method for mutating NPD risk genes in human stem cells at large scale.

In the modified cells, a selected NPD risk gene is mutated so that it no longer makes a functional protein. The modified stem cells can subsequently be turned into neurons and other brain cells to model the consequences of risk gene mutations in a simplified, lab-based version of the human brain.

In the initial phase of the project, the teams tested 23 NPD risk genes, reported in work published in a recent article in the journal Stem Cell Reports. The resulting stem cell lines will be made available to other researchers worldwide to facilitate research on those risk genes and their contribution to NPD.

In future works, Pang, Duan and the other members of the consortium will join forces to generate mutated stem cell lines for a much larger number of risk genes, with the ultimate goal of understanding the genetic causes of NPD and generating better treatments.

"The hope is that this collaborative work will generate a highly impactful resource for the neuroscience and psychiatric research community," said Panchision.

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