Psychiatric Genomics Consortium: Past And Present

Abstract

The Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (http://pgc.unc.edu), now in its eighth year, is one of the most innovative experiments in the history of psychiatry. We have unified much of the field to enable rapid progress in elucidating the genetic basis of psychiatric disorders. We have 800+ investigators from 36 countries and >400K subjects. The PGC has attracted a cadre of outstanding scientists whose careers center on our work.During the first phase of our efforts, we completed mega-analyses for ADHD, AUT, BD, MDD, and SCZ and preliminary cross-disorder analysis (cases defined as either BIP, MDD or SCZ). In total, the PGC has published 17 main papers plus 31 secondary analysis/methods development papers including a landmark Nature paper identifying 108 loci for schizophrenia (SCZ). Due to our open-source approach, there are 75+ papers that use PGC results, and we know of numerous groups that are using our findings to direct basic and applied research (including therapeutic development).We will describe the results of the two phases of our efforts to date, including recent efforts extending GWAS to >120,000 new individuals across multiple disorders using a custom microarray, PsychCHIP.