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Dear Friends,

Daniel R. Weinberger, M.D.As 2024 comes to a close, I am filled with gratitude for the incredible progress we’ve made this year at the Lieber Institute for Brain Development. Our work to better understand the brain and translate this knowledge into treatments for mental illness and brain disorders would not be possible without the dedication of our team, the generosity of our supporters, and the trust of our community.

This year has been one of remarkable achievements. Our drug development program has reached new heights, with two major breakthroughs. Our collaboration with Blackbird Laboratories of Baltimore advanced a promising new antipsychotic drug targeting a novel mechanism, while our partnership with Boehringer Ingelheim achieved a critical milestone for a novel brain active COMT inhibitor—a project with the potential to fundamentally transform treatment for conditions like schizophrenia, cognitive impairment, and Parkinson’s disease. These achievements represent years of dedication from our team and offer hope for millions living with mental illness and neurological disease.

The Institute published groundbreaking studies in some of the world’s leading scientific journals, including Science, Neuron and Nature Neuroscience. We continue to lead the world in mapping genes that are involved in behavioral brain disorders and expressed in diverse areas of the brain. We secured a record amount of research grants and earned prestigious awards, like the Amazon Imagine Pioneer Award for AI. These milestones reflect the importance and impact of our innovative research on brain development and genetics of mental illness.

As we look ahead, 2025 promises to be another transformative year. We have big plans to expand our research, develop new therapeutics, forge new partnerships, and continue making real strides toward our ultimate goal of preventing mental illness.

To give you a deeper glimpse into our work, I’ve included a selection of publications that highlight some of our accomplishments and milestones from 2024. These represent just a fraction of the impactful work being done at the Lieber Institute for Brain Development.

I invite you to follow our journey in 2025 as we tackle these critical challenges. Together, we can make a difference in the lives of millions. Thank you for being part of our mission. Wishing you a new year filled with hope and promise.

Warm regards,

Daniel R. Weinberger, M.D.
Director and CEO, Lieber Institute for Brain Development
Maltz Research Laboratories
www.LIBD.org

Selected News From 2024

Dec 31, 2024: New AI Model Examines DNA Methylation to Better Understand Mental Illness

LIBD scientists report the first study using artificial intelligence (AI) to predict how our genomes in individual cells in the brain are influenced by the environment. Read story here.

 

Dec. 3, 2024: LIBD Wins Amazon Web Services Imagine Grant for Nonprofits

Lieber Institute scientists led by Shizhong Han, Ph.D., a Lead Investigator at the Institute, along with Staff Scientists Michael Nagle, Ph.D., and Jiyun Zhou, Ph.D., will use the funding to develop a new generative AI approach to create new drugs to treat mental illness and evaluate those drugs for effectiveness. Read story here.

 

Sept. 4, 2024: LIBD Scientists Find Genes Adjacent to Schizophrenia Risk Genes Carry Their Own Risk

A new paper from the laboratory of Lieber Institute Investigator Giulio Pergola, PhD, published Sept. 4 in Neuron, examines many recently published networks of genes that neighbor schizophrenia risk genes in the brain. The research finds these genes are guilty by association and, in fact, carry their own risk for schizophrenia. Read the paper.

 

August 16, 2024: LIBD In the News: Lieber Institute partners with Black community leaders to unlock secrets of the brain: ‘We will not be left behind’

The Baltimore Sun covered the African Ancestry Neuroscience Research Initiative (AANRI) research. Read the story.

 

June 19, 2024: LIBD In the News: How a Baltimore neuroscience study is rewriting Black America’s relationship with medical research

STAT News covered the AANRI research in its Juneteenth edition. Read the story.

 

June 12, 2024: LIBD In the News: African ancestry genes may be linked to Black Americans’ risk for some brain disorders

NPR national science reporter Jon Hamilton interviews lead author Dr. Kynon Benjamin and AANRI advisor Dr. Kafui Dzirasa. Listen.

 

June 2024: LIBD In the News: Six Schizophrenic Brothers

Dr. Daniel Weinberger was featured as the medical expert in the HBO documentary series “Six Schizophrenic Brothers,” based on the bestselling book “Hidden Valley Road.” Both the book and the series feature Dr. Weinberger’s expertise on the Galvin family and its six schizophrenic sons. Learn more.

 

May 24, 2024: Lieber Institute Scientists Lead Significant PsychENCODE Research in Science

The journal Science in May published a raft of papers produced by the PsychENCODE Consortium, and Lieber Institute scientists played a crucial role on three of the nine articles. The National Institutes of Health founded the PsychENCODE project in 2015 as a multidisciplinary initiative to study the molecular basis of neuropsychiatric diseases in hopes of learning how to better treat and prevent them.

 

May 24, 2024: LIBD In the News: A new study of brain samples from Black people shows the influence of environment and genetics on mental disorders

Dr. Daniel Weinberger and Dr. Kynon Benjamin were featured in Science magazine discussing the AANRI research. Read the story.

 

May 20, 2024: African Ancestry Neuroscience Research Initiative’s First Study Identifies Key Genes in the Brain that Account for Higher Rates of Some Brain Disorders in Black Americans

The June issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience featured as its cover story the first research to emerge from the Lieber Institute’s African Ancestry Neuroscience Research Initiative, finding no evidence that genetic ancestry is responsible for differences in the prevalence of psychiatric disorders and behavioral traits, such as schizophrenia and depression, across populations of European or African ancestry. Instead, those differences may be driven by variation in environmental exposures. Read the story.

 

May 6, 2024: LIBD In the News: Dr. Weinberger in STAT on Living Brain Biopsies

Dr. Daniel Weinberger commented on living brain biopsies for an article in STAT about biopsies taken from deep brain stimulation (DBS) patients at Mount Sinai in Manhattan. Lieber Institute researchers led by Dr. Leonardo Collado Torres released as a preprint a rebuttal paper addressing Mount Sinai’s Living Brain Project in the fall of 2023.

 

April 30, 2024: LIBD Researchers Develop Possible Scoring System for Schizophrenia Symptoms

A team of scientists at the Lieber Institute for Brain Development have developed a new type of genetic score that is both associated with risk for illness and also biologically interpretable and potentially individually meaningful. Their research, entitled “Dopamine signaling enriched striatal gene set predicts striatal dopamine synthesis and physiological activity in vivo,” was published April 30 in the journal Nature Communications. Read the paper.

 

March 2024: LIBD In the News: Look Again | British Columbia Schizophrenia Society Podcast

The popular podcast Look Again interviewed Dr. Daniel Weinberger about the state of schizophrenia research and the hope for a cure. Listen.