Psychiatric Disease Program

The underlying biology of psychiatric disease remains largely a mystery. The Broad's Psychiatric Disease Program, headed by Ed Scolnick, aims to unravel the molecular basis of psychiatric disease, with the ultimate aim of improving diagnosis, treatment and, if possible, prevention. The primary emphasis is on bipolar disease, schizophrenia, and major depression, illnesses that together affect more than three percent of the human population.

In February 2007, the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research within the Broad Institute’s Psychiatric Disease Program was founded by a grant from the Stanley Medical Research Institute. The Stanley Center is a unique entity at the Broad, in that we are clearly therapeutically focused. Our goal is to create a cohesive small organization that combines the creativity, spontaneity, and brilliant ideas of academia with the focus, structure, and multi-disciplinary approaches of industrial drug discovery. The Stanley Center’s mission is to discover new approaches to the molecular understanding, diagnosis, and pharmacological treatment of bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. More details on the projects within the Stanley Center are here. Also, as a current summary of our progress and plans, we have included our Executive Summary from our 2009 Stanley Center Third Annual Progress Report (written and submitted in January 2010).

In February 2009, we announced a new initiative, which we’ve termed ‘PsychHTS’, also enabled by a grant from the Stanley Medical Research Institute. We proposed this pilot program to encourage novel ideas from investigators working in areas relevant to psychiatric disease who may not be experienced in designing or thinking about high-throughput screeining (HTS) projects. It fits within the existing Broad Institute Chemical Biology and Novel Therapeutics (‘CBNT’) Programs’ process for proposing and executing high-throughput screening (HTS) projects. We encourage anyone with an idea or interest to please contact us—often a brief brainstorming conference call with Dr. Scolnick and key experts from the Broad’s CBNT group can help focus an exciting idea into a feasible proposal for a screen. You can find more details on PsychHTS and the application forms here.

Finally, as an overview of general fields of study within the Psychiatric Disease Program and the Stanley Center, major areas of focus include:

Genetic analysis

Heredity (whether a first-degree relative has either disease) is the greatest risk factor for either schizophrenias or bipolar disorder. Therefore the best means to understanding the underlying mechanisms that cause these illnesses is to identify and characterize the risk genes for psychiatric diseases through linkage, association, and sequencing studies in the human population.

Neurobiology

As risk genes are defined, the functional consequences of gene variants will be studied both in cultured cells and in rodent, zebrafish, fruitfly or other relevant models of the neurocircuitry of the illness. Close ties to the MIT neuroscience community are facilitating this work.

Translational research

High-throughput chemical screens are used to identify molecules that modulate important cellular targets related to neural function.

Medicinal chemistry

Novel medicinal chemistry strategies, supported by computational chemistry, will be used to optimize leads from the various projects to enhance desired pharmacological properties.

Models of disease

Animal and cellular models for human psychiatric disease are developed and used to investigate the function of candidate genes and pathways and to test lead compounds.