Schizophrenia Working Group Leadership
Work with us!
If you have questions regarding the PGC SCZ workgroup or projects that are currently being conducted, please contact the workgroup chairs.
For any questions or ideas related to research dissemination (e.g., via this webpage, social media, blogs, press outlets), please contact the workgroup outreach liaison.
If you have questions about how to access summary statistics or genotype-level data, or are interested to submit a secondary analysis proposal, please contact the workgroup data access committee representative.
About Us
Our History
The Schizophrenia workgroup has been part of the PCG since 2007. During that time, our membership has grown to include over 500 investigators from more than 100 institutions representing around 45 countries.
Our work focuses on establishing the genetic and pathophysiological basis of schizophrenia using approaches from genetics, bioinformatics and biostatistics; psychiatry, psychology and cognitive neuroscience; cellular modelling and drug discovery.
Our Motivation
- To expand our samples to include at least 150,000 people with schizophrenia, in order to capture more of the genetic variation that impacts on risk of the disorder,
- To enhance the ancestral diversity of our samples in order to both capture more genetic variation and ensure the work benefits all human populations,
- To use genomics to inform hypotheses of pathophysiological processes underlying schizophrenia,
- To develop algorithms aimed at predicting important clinical outcomes e.g. treatment resistance,
- To develop methods of stratifying individuals with schizophrenia, potentially with individuals with other psychiatric disorders, into subgroups that may be relatively homogeneous in order to identify patient strata who have different therapeutic needs,
- To understand the relationships between schizophrenia, other psychiatric disorders, and physical co-morbidities,
- To identify novel targets for therapeutics,
- To identify risk and resilience exposures that might provide clues to prevention through the integration of genomics and epidemiology,
- To impact on improved care through outreach with the public, patients, relatives and external academia and industry.
Get Involved!
Currently, we are looking for new collaborators with genotyping and depression data in order to increase our sample size for our next large-scale genome-wide meta-analyses of SCZ.
If you are interested in contributing to the workgroup, please contact Professors Michael O’Donovan and James Walters - in your e-mail please use the title ‘Membership of SCZ group of the PGC’. For existing members of the workgroup who wish to propose secondary analyses, please e-mail PGC DAC Representative. Further information can be found in the SCZ Data Access Portal (see above).
Publications
Lam M et al. 2019. Comparative genetic architectures of schizophrenia in East Asian and European populations. Nature Genetics 51, 1670 – 1678. PMID: 31740837.
Ripke S et al. 2014. Biological insights from 108 schizophrenia-associated genetic loci. Nature 511, 421 – 427. PMID: 25056061.
Cross-Disorder Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium. 2019. Genomics relationships, novel loci, and pleiotropic mechanisms across eight psychiatric disorders. Cell 179(7), 1469 – 1482. PMID: 31835028.
Funders
