MENTAL ILLNESS: THE NEXT FRONTIER

MENTAL ILLNESS: THE NEXT FRONTIER
Developing DNA tests for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder will be the focus of a new center at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York state. The Stanley Center for Psychiatric Genomics will be established with $25 million--one of the largest gifts in the lab's 117-year history--from the Theodore and Vada Stanley Foundation.
Earlier this year, the Stanleys funded an interdisciplinary center on severe mental illnesses at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts (Science, 9 March, p. 1351). The new center has a narrower mission: "to unambiguously diagnose patients with psychiatric disorders based on their DNA sequence in 10 years' time," according to a 22 June announcement. That's a tall order, the lab's president Bruce Stillman acknowledges, because so far, only a handful of genetic variants have been strongly linked to psychiatric illnesses. The focus of the center is influenced by the fact that the Stanleys have a son with bipolar disorder, and Cold Spring's chancellor, James Watson, has a son with a "schizophrenialike" disorder, Stillman says.

The lab will use the gift to scale up its genomics efforts and hire scientists to comb DNA sequences from schizophrenia and bipolar patients for risk-related genetic variations. "I think that it is fair to say that we are witnessing a fundamental change in psychiatric genetics research," says David Porteous, a medical geneticist at the University of Edinburgh, U.K., who plans to collaborate with the new center.