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BrainSEQTM is a landmark, pre-competitive collaboration with seven leading pharmaceutical companies to drive novel target discovery for neuropsychiatric disorders.

BrainSEQTM

The Lieber Institute and pharmaceutical companies AstraZeneca, Astellas, Eli Lilly and Company, Lundbeck, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer Inc. and Roche are participating in an early-stage research consortium BrainSEQ™, with the goal of expanding knowledge around the genetic contribution to brain disorders in the hope of identifying potential new treatment options.

  • Utilizing LIBD’s unprecedented brain tissue repository to generate and analyze genomic data related to neuropsychiatric disorders.
  • Making data freely available to scientists worldwide.

The Consortium works as a team in completing deep, paired end RNA sequencing (average 100M 100bp reads/sample) in up to 800 brain samples, starting with DLPFC and hippocampus in year one, using both Poly A and RiboZero RNA preparations and to map and annotate the human brain transcriptome in normal development and in neurospsychiatric disease. Subscription fees from Pharma partners help finance the cost of the sequencing, and partners are also contributing experienced scientists to participate in an analytic team to accomplish the complex task of assembling and analyzing the sequence results. Each partner can use the transcriptome data as well as the associated genomic and epigenomic data that are available for every brain for their own private purposes once the shared transcriptome assembly and analyses are completed.