Working under the umbrella of the PsychENCODE Consortium, the mental health research project established in 2015 by the National Institutes of Health, a team of Mount Sinai scientists has uncovered important new insights into the molecular biology of neuropsychiatric disease through two new studies published in a special issue of Science on Friday, May 24. These investigations, conducted with colleagues from other major research centers, involve the largest single-cell analysis to date of the brains of people with schizophrenia, and a first-of-its-kind population-scale map of the regulatory components of the brain that provides critical insights into the pathogenesis of mental health disorders. We desperately need new directions for developing treatments for individuals with schizophrenia and other serious mental health illnesses.
We now have the technology and methodology to do a deeper dive than ever before into the biology of neuropsychiatric diseases, and believe that through our latest research we have significantly advanced the field." Panos Roussos, MD, PhD, senior author of both studies; Professor of Psychiatry , and Genetics and Genomic Sciences, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; and Director of the Center for Disease Neurogenomics Since the launch of PsychENCODE, dozens of scientists from Mount Sinai along with colleagues from 14 other research institutions have identified several hundred new risk genes for mental disorders that include schizophrenia, .
