USC to Head Global Genetic Effort
Photo/Mark Berndt
The USC Center for Genomic Psychiatry and Massachusetts General Hospital together received more than $25 million in grant funding to lead an international network of academic medical centers in creating the Genomic Psychiatry Cohort.
Blood and DNA from 40,000 subjects will be deposited in a repository, along with clinical and phenotypic data.
Professors Michele T. Pato, holder of the Della Martin Chair in Psychiatry, and Carlos N. Pato, chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and the Franz Alexander Professor of Psychiatry at the Keck School of Medicine, will head the national effort to collect data on 10,000 patients with schizophrenia, as well as 10,000 individuals without the disorder.
The duo will study 5,000 patients with bipolar disorder as part of a coordinated effort led by Massachusetts investigators Jordan Smoller and Pamela Sklar to collect an additional 19,000 patients with bipolar disorder.
The cohort will be the largest coordinated effort ever undertaken to understand the underlying genetic risks for these illnesses, according to Carlos Pato, who also directs the Center for Genomic Psychiatry at the Keck School of Medicine.
“Our focus is on both determining genetic risks for serious mental illnesses and in developing a new model of care for these diseases,” he said. “This will be the major national effort in this area for the next five years. We expect a number of important studies to result from this effort.”
USC researchers will conduct large-scale genomic investigations in this population and also have a unique ability to follow patients for long-term studies.
“This aspect of the design is critical to allow a number of follow-up studies and the opportunity to explore disease course and future treatment options,” Carlos Pato explained. “We are building a resource for future studies.”
“Large scale population-based studies are critical for this work,” Michele Pato said. “The ultimate goal is the development of treatments to better intervene in these disorders. If we are able to identify the risks earlier we may, through observation and pre-treatment, be able to limit the impact of these diseases on people’s lives.”
Founded in 2006, the USC Center for Genomic Psychiatry is based at the Zilkha Neurogenetic Institute and the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.
The center is focused on understanding the risks that lead to the development of serious mental illness and is dedicated to creating treatments for these disabling disorders as well as identifying interventions to manage the risks.
Carlos and Michele Pato and the research team from the Center for Genomic Psychiatry benefited from the efforts of USC’s Washington, D.C. Office of Research Advancement, which helped to identify the funding opportunity and worked closely with National Institutes of Health staff to fully understand what the federal agency was looking for in a successful proposal.
The D.C. Office then worked with Keck faculty to assure that the proposal submitted was scientifically competitive. “This is exactly the circumstance where it was envisioned that a D.C. office could have a significant effect,” said Steven Moldin, the executive director.
Thomas Lehner, chief of the genomics research branch of the National Institutes of Health, said, “We’re very excited that we’re able to support cutting-edge research like this. The cohort will collect an unprecedented amount of data and will become a major resource for researchers around the world.”
Other institutions that will contribute to the Genomic Psychiatry Cohort are the Medical College of Georgia; SUNY, Stony Brook; SUNY Upstate Medical University; Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles; UCLA; Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio; the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Massachusetts General Hospital; Cardiff University, Wales; and Karolinska University, Sweden.
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USC in the News
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The Chronicle of Higher Education mentioned USC’s $6 billion fundraising campaign. The story noted that USC had already raised $1 billion in a “quiet phase,” including the $200 million naming gift from USC Trustee and alumnus David Dornsife and wife Dana Dornsife to the USC Dornsife College.
The Guardian (U.K.) highlighted two major gifts to USC in a list of the 10 biggest philanthropic benefactors in America. The list included the $200 million naming gift from USC Trustee and alumnus David Dornsife and wife Dana Dornsife to the USC Dornsife College, and the $110 million gift from USC Trustee and USC Viterbi School alumnus John Mork and wife Julie to create the USC Mork Family Scholars Program.
The New York Times featured the USC U.S.-China Institute documentary “Assignment: China — The Week that Changed the World.” The documentary, part of a series, examines media coverage of the 1972 Nixon trip that reshaped U.S.-China relations after a quarter century of isolation and hostility. “People look back now and take it for granted that the outcome was preordained,” said the institute’s Mike Chinoy, who produced the documentary. Voice of America also featured the story.
Los Angeles Times featured the Oscar Senti-meter, a tool developed by the USC Annenberg School, Los Angeles Times and IBM that analyzes thousands of tweets about the Academy Awards nominees. The story noted that Mexican actor Demian Bechir received an enormous boost on Twitter the day of the nominations, with a total of 6,893 tweets mentioning him, a 47-fold increase from the day before. The story noted the tool uses language-recognition technology developed in collaboration with USC Viterbi School’s Signal Analysis and Interpretation Lab.
The Times of India (India) featured a three-day medical emergency training workshop organized in association with USC. At the workshop, held at GCS Medical College in India, 50 doctors and more than 100 paramedics learned how to improve emergency support systems. William Mallon of the Keck School of USC said that discussion topics included the use of portable ultrasonic devices to scan patients. “The ultrasound applications help physicians make accurate and timely decisions,” he noted. Daily News & Analysis (India) also featured the workshop.
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