108 loci associated with schizophrenia
Post date: Jul 23, 2014 1:50:06 PM
Big big news this week in nature. I was a small part of this work. I believe there's still about 15-20 years ahead before we have new families of genetics-informed drugs for schizophrenia, but this is a major advance. It's sort of a human genome project for schizophrenia, identifying a large number of the genes implicated in the condition and setting forth an initial road map for drug development.
To give you a context of how rapid we got here:
- +/-1990-2000+/-: nothing really was discovered. Lots of underpowered linkage studies and candidate gene studies
- ~2009: 1 genome-wide significant hit, an imputed variant in MHC
- 2013: I co-first authored a paper identifying 13 new risk loci (22 total)
- Today: 108 risk loci, several pathways implicated
Check out the paper, well worth reading. Nice News & Views commentary here also, and nature news item here.
Other media appearances:
NY Times article here
BBC article here
Time article here
Boston Globe article here
Science news article here
The Scientist article here
NIMH news article here and Tom Insel's blog article here
LA Times news article here