LIBD and 23andME, Inc. have formed a partnership to discover new therapies for common behavioral disorders. The goal and focus of the partnership to translate clinical genetic associations in the unique 23andMe program into biological mechanisms in human brain underlying these disorders, which will lead to the discovery of novel therapeutic targets. As part of the target discovery phase, 23andME has identified a set of phenotypes, related genetic loci and SNPs, for neuropsychiatric disorders that are well represented in their proprietary dataset– e.g. MDD, PTSD and anxiety disorders. LIBD is engaged in interrogating our high content postmortem human brain RNA sequencing data related to these loci and SNPs, in various brain regions known to be relevant to the phenotypes of interest and survey all transcriptional features, with the objective of identifying a specific transcript feature that is associated with both genetic risk and illness state. This molecular mechanism of clinical association (target) will then be explored as part of the development phase of the project.
