Severe Mental Illness: Towards Therapeutics

This two-day in-person symposium, chaired by Dr. Steve Hyman, director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at Broad Institute, Dr. Guoping Feng of McGovern Institute at MIT and director of the Neurobiology and Model Systems group of the Stanley Center, and Dr. Benjamin Neale of Massachusetts General Hospital and director of Genetics at the Stanley Center, brought together scientists working on the frontiers of genetics, neurobiology, computational psychiatry, and therapeutic development for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism spectrum disorder, and related neuropsychiatric disorders.

The central theme in 2023 addressed the challenges of turning findings from the complex polygenetic landscape of mental illnesses into biology that will inform therapeutic discovery and the identification of biomarkers.  It's clear that new technologies, analytic techniques and models of disease are needed that can accommodate the polygenic background influences on even penetrant disease alleles before we can hope to gain greater understanding of pathological mechanisms. 

The illnesses highlighted in this symposium cause lifelong disability to millions of persons — combined, more than 3 percent of the global population is affected by these severe disorders.