The Science of The Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (Part 1)

Abstract

Overall Abstract On the advice of the Jerusalem organizers, the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC) is submitting two symposia which are meant to occur on the same afternoon. The PGC, now in its ninth 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 900+ investigators from 40+ countries and >400K subjects. The PGC has published 17 main papers plus 31 secondary analysis/methods development papers. Due to our open-source approach, there are 75+ papers that use PGC results, and numerous groups are using our findings to direct basic and applied research (including therapeutic development). Large amounts of new data will be available to the PGC in the next five years. We have developed a rigorous set of approaches that are yielding discoveries for all of the initial five disorders (which led to adding four new disorders). We thus have the unique opportunity to rapidly and efficiently increase our knowledge of common and rare variation in order to understand the causes and comorbidities of major psychiatric disorders. Our overarching goal is to identify “actionable” variation via the empirical evaluation of the etiological, clinical, nosological, therapeutic, and biological significance of our genomic findings. In Part 1, we provide a big picture overview of where we've been and where we are (Sklar) followed by a description of the just awarded PGC3 grant (Sullivan). This is followed by updates of the current status and future plans for the key PGC groups: ADHD and ASD (Borglum from iPSYCH), bipolar disorder (Kelsoe), eating disorders (Bulik), and MDD (Levinson).