NHGRI Center of Excellence

We have received preliminary word that we will be awarded a Center of Excellence from the NHGRI and NIMH. The PIs are Fernando Pardo-Manuel de Villena and Patrick Sullivan. This "high-risk, high-payoff" center involvs 17 UNC scientists, and the goal is to use the collaborative cross to provide a systems biology platform for psychiatric genetics.

Another K-award!

Dr Samantha Meltzer-Brody landed a K award from the NIMH. This brings the lab total to six K awardees. Congrats Sam!

Paper accepted into Nature

A paper on common genetic variation from the International Schizophrenia Consortium has been accepted into Nature. The Sullivan lab is a key part of the ISC via the Swedish samples collected as part of an R01 to UNC with genotyping conducted by Pamela Sklar and colleagues at the Broad Institute.

UNC leads genetic research into Anorexia Nervosa

The Genetics of Anorexia Nervosa (GCAN) consortium will be part of the 3rd wave of studies funded by the Wellcome Trust Case-Control Consortim (WTCCC3). GCAN is lead by UNC investigators Cynthia Bulik and Patrick Sullivan along with David Collier of University College London. 4000 cases with AN will be genotyped later in 2009.

GAIN MDD GWAS published

Genome-wide association for major depressive disorder: a possible role for the presynaptic protein piccolo.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19065144

Psychiatric GWAS Consortium overview paper published

A framework for interpreting genome-wide association studies of psychiatric disorders.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19002139

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.