Symposium on the Emerging Genetics and Neurobiology of Severe Mental Illness
This two-day symposium, chaired by Drs. Steve Hyman, Director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute and Guoping Feng of McGovern Institute at MIT and Director of the Model Systems group of the Stanley Center, will bring together leading scientists working on the genetics and neurobiology of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism and related neuropsychiatric disorders. The illnesses highlighted in this symposium cause lifelong disability to millions of persons – combined, more than 3% of the world population are affected by one of these severe disorders. This is an exciting moment in the science, as results emerging from large-scale genetics studies are revealing shared and unshared risk factors across multiple disorders, and more importantly are beginning to coalesce around molecular mechanisms underlying these diseases. In the coming years neuroscientists will be increasingly able to put the emerging genetics to work in the service of new understandings of pathophysiology, the development of biomarkers, and much needed new treatments. We hope, particularly, to attract graduate students and postdoctoral associates to this symposium in order to build this interdisciplinary field at a time of opportunity.
Day 1
7:45
Registration and Breakfast
8:45 - 9:00
Welcome
Session 1: Recent Advances in Genetics Chair: Aarno Palotie
9:00 – 12:40
Population isolates in identifying low frequency variants in neurodevelopmental disorders Aarno Palotie
CNVs conferring risk of schizophrenia affect cognition and brain structure in control carriers
Hreinn Stefansson
De novo mutations; convergence from CNVs and exome sequencing identifies
synaptic pathology in schizophrenia and other neurodevelopmental disorders Michael O’Donovan
When, where and what (cell types): moving from genomics to biology in autism spectrum disorders Matthew State
10:40 – 11:00
Break
Psychiatric Genomics Consortium quadruples schizophrenia GWAS sample size
to 35,000 cases and 47,000 controls Stephan Ripke
Design of PsychChip and analysis of rare coding variation in schizophrenia Benjamin Neale
Complex variation and the genome’s missing pieces – what does whole genome
sequencing have to teach us Steven McCarroll
Late Breaking Talk (15 min) A statistical framework to interpret the role of de novo variation in psychiatric disease
Kaitlin Samocha
Optical deconstruction of fully-assembled biological systems Karl Deisseroth
12:20 – 1:15
Lunch
Session 4: Translational Research and Target Identification Chair: Edward Scolnick
1:15 – 2:55
Bridging genetics to drug discovery
Dan Curtis
A synaptic functional approach to CNS drug discovery David Gerber
Quantitative proteomics to identify protein-small molecule interactions in
primary neurons Monica Schenone
Establishing an unbiased, scalable functional assay for neurons using multielectrode array recording Jen Pan
2:55 – 3:15
Break
3:15 – 3:30
Development of D2R β-arrestin biased antagonists for the treatment of schizophrenia Michael Lewis
3:30 – 3:45
Late Breaking Talk (15 min) Genetic modulation of neuronal competition homeostasis in the adult dentate gyrus to enhance hippocampal functions
Kathleen McAvoy