NIMH Awards $22.6 Million for Center for Collaborative Research on Mental Disorders

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has funded a five-year, $22.6 million Center for Collaborative Genetic Studies on Mental Disorders at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.

Under a cooperative agreement, the Center will accelerate progress toward understanding genetic origins of mental disorders including autism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression. The Center will encourage the sharing of biological as well as clinical and genetic data from individuals or families with these disorders and perform and disseminate its own analyses of these data.

The Center will replace the NIMH Center for Genetic Studies (NCGS), housed at Rutgers, which, in the five years since it began, has established over 17,000 cell lines from blood samples, distributed over 25,000 DNA samples and made distributions of family, clinical and genotype data to over 100 groups of investigators around the world.

The new Center will serve the scientific needs of the NIMH and its researchers by continuing the work of the NCGS and also will enhance research collaborations and develop novel methods for data analysis that will enhance replication of genetic findings, said Steven Moldin, Ph.D., NIMH project director for the Center. The Centers activities are expected to greatly accelerate gene discovery in mental disorders such as autism, mood disorders and schizophrenia, and to lead to the identification of novel targets for new therapies. Ultimately, we expect these results to revolutionize the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of these disorders, said Moldin.

Jay Tischfield, Ph.D. of Rutgers is the principal investigator for the center project. John Rice, Ph.D., at the Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, will serve as co-director.

NIMH is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Federal Governments primary agency for biomedical and behavioral research. NIH is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.