Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

Epigenetics is an innovative and rapidly emerging field that can be applied to psychiatric disorders in order to decrease the erratic nature of treatment outcomes that so many patients continue to experience. This project will use a large discovery data set to determine the role that the epigenetic modification known as DNA methylation plays in anxiety disorder symptoms, as well as poor response to and increased side effects of antidepressant medications. Epigenetic analyses are at the cutting edge of genomic studies and allow us to gather information beyond the sequence of DNA to examine the small chemical modifications that attach to the DNA. DNA methylation can significantly alter how a gene works. In the context of this project, the genes that are turned on (or turned off) can lead to increased risk for failure to respond to a medication, or to development of serious side effects. As mood and anxiety disorders are closely connected to the function of our stress response system, it is also important to discover how the epigenetic differences of our stress system genes may influence the effectiveness of antidepressant treatment. The project will be expanded to examine many epigenetic sites across the entire human genome to discover new targets involved in treatment outcomes of anxiety disorders, in addition to determining how DNA methylation may change over time with medication treatment. As 50% of all antidepressant treated patients fail to ever reach remission, shortening the trial-and-error process of finding effective medications for patients will significantly improve each individual patient's quality of life, reduce the costly side-effect burden, and offer substantial socioeconomic benefits to the Canadian health care system.