Institutional Profile: The Center for Biomarker Research and Personalized Medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University: advancing psychiatric drug treatment.

Abstract

The Center for Biomarker Research and Personalized Medicine is a small, focused and technology-driven organization, sited within the School of Pharmacy on the Medical College of Virginia Campus of Virginia Commonwealth University. The Center was established in 2006, with a mission to improve understanding and treatment of psychiatric disease by employing the latest advances in molecular biology, informatics and statistics. We take the philosophy that large-scale, exploratory studies are crucial to achieve our aims because strong biological associations have been historically absent for psychiatric disorders. Our work follows two main streams: the first being disease biomarker research, such as discovering genes contributing risk for schizophrenia or depression. The second stream is the discovery of biomarkers for therapeutic drug response, where our genome-wide association studies of antipsychotic and antidepressant response have yielded multiple new leads. With the recent success of large-scale biological investigations of psychiatric disorders, we are very optimistic about the future. By engaging cutting-edge technologies such as next-generation DNA sequencing, coupled with biological data integration, we may further probe the biological underpinnings of psychiatric disorders and response to drug treatment.