Thursday, September 18, 2003

New Program Will Pursue Schizophrenia Gene Leads
NIH press release - "The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), today announced a new program expanding genetics research on schizophrenia in its own Bethesda, Maryland laboratories." The program "over the next decade, will redouble intramural efforts focused on the genetics and neurobiology of cognition and psychosis. Multidisciplinary teams using mouse, fruit-fly and cell culture models, as well as clinical studies and brain imaging, will tease apart how the vulnerability genes work at the molecular, cellular and systems levels to discover the "risk architecture" of schizophrenia. Rather than relying on traditional clinical features of the illness, they will pursue changes in the brain underlying the altered thinking and emotionality associated with the illness."