Sullivan Lab receives University Cancer Research Fund Innovator Award

Patrick and Helena received an Innovator Award from UNC’s Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center University Cancer Research Fund to establish the Tobacco and Genetics (TAG) Consortium. The goal of the TAG Consortium is to conduct a genome-wide association study (GWAS) meta-analysis for smoking-related phenotypes using genotype and smoking phenotype data from existing GWAS of other traits e.g., heart disease, diabetes, etc. The sample size of the TAG Consortium may approach 100,000 subjects and is a multi-national collaboration which has the potential to identify novel genetic loci for smoking.

GAIN MDD data released

The GAIN genome-wide association dataset for Major Depressive Disorder is now available at dbGaP. Dr. Sullivan is the PI of this study that was one of six funded by the GAIN initiative of the Foundation for the NIH. All subjects are from two fantastic studies in the Netherlands - cases from the Netherlands Study of Depression and Anxiety led by Prof Brenda Penninx and controls from the Netherlands Twin Registry directed by Prof Dorret Boomsma. GWAS data are available for 1860 cases and 1860 controls who were individually genotyped for ~430,000 SNPs. Analyses are on-going.

NIH grants awarded!

The Sullivan lab received two NIH grant awards. Dr Sullivan is the PI on the first, an $7M R01 from the NIMH to establish a large case-control collection of subjects with schizophrenia in Sweden. This project is in close conjunction with Drs Christina Hultman and Paul Lichtenstein at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm and Drs Pamela Sklar and Ed Scolnick at the Broad Institute. Dr Sullivan is a co-investigator on a U01 lead by Dr Jane Costello at Duke that is part of the NIDA GEDI project. The aims of this application are to investigate gene-environment interactions and liability to drug phenotypes.

CATIE SCZ dataset released

The CATIE genome-wide association dataset for schizophrenia is now available at the NIMH Genetics repository. Dr. Sullivan lead this collaboration between UNC-CH, the CATIE study, and Eli Lilly. GWAS data are available for 1438 cases and 1433 controls who were individually genotyped for 492,900 SNPs.