Grant: CIHR Fellowship

Schizophrenia is a common mental health disorder affecting close to 1% of the population. This condition typically develops in young adults and adolescents. Patients with schizophrenia are at high risk of mortality and long-term chronic disability. Few advances in the treatment and management of this disorder have been made in the last decades due to the complexity of the brain and the lack of any reliable biomarkers. It is known that schizophrenia is highly heritable and significant progress has been made in the past years identifying risk genes and variants. With new genome sequencing technologies, we can now analyze every gene of a patient and can start doing personalized risk assessment. In our study we will look for genetic variants that can explain schizophrenia and predict which patients are at highest risk of treatment resistance. We will establish guidelines pertaining to recommended genetic testing in patients with first-episode psychosis and evaluate the impact of genetic testing on their management. This will be an invaluable resource for clinicians treating patients with schizophrenia and will help harmonize the investigation by establishing the standard of care. But even with genetics playing an important role in schizophrenia, little is known about the actual changes in the biology of the brain. This lack of identification of clear mechanisms is a major challenge for the field, limiting meaningful clinical applications. This is why we will investigate the changes in the expression of genes in the brains of patients with schizophrenia. This will allow the identification of the dysregulated pathways and eventually be used for the development of new therapeutic approaches.