Dr. Weinberger, Founding Director and CEO at LIBD, describes the unique model: to understand how genes and the environment affect the development of the brain, to identify how this is relevant to the risk biology of psychosis, schizophrenia, and related disorders, and to translate these findings into new therapies.
Research at LIBD is focused on studying the brain itself through what has become a vast, exquisitely curated repository of donated human brain tissue. Dr. Weinberger explains that the researchers don’t study the “risk genes” per se, but rather they study how these genes are processed in the human brain to account for risk. To enhance the study of brain development and its relationship to building the programs that ultimately are malfunctioning in people that have psychiatric disorders, there is also a major stem cell biology program that enables investigation with the very first cells. Finally, there is an important third arm of the research program that works to translate new findings into novel, more effective psychiatric therapies.
Dr. Weinberger also describes how the unique and flexible model at LIBD has brought some major players back into the realm of identifying new targets for development of psychiatric medications. LIBD has formed a historic consortium with six pharmaceutical companies to work together non-competitively, sharing data and contributing resources toward the development of a public database related to how genes build the human brain.