Anne Bruun Rovsing
Discovering variant-gene effects in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and the impact of lithium
Anne Bruun Rovsing, Department of Biomedicine at Aarhus University, has received a Lundbeck Foundation Postdoc grant worth DKK 2,286,700.
About the project
Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are devastating mental illnesses with high personal and social costs. The development of new drugs has been exceptionally challenging. However, the recent success of large genetic studies presents new opportunities. Genetic studies in hundreds of thousands of patients have revealed hundreds of genetic regions with variants that are highly correlated with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Though, pinpointing the exact genetic variants within these regions that correlate with the disease is difficult.
The goal of this project is to identify both causal genetic variants and the genes they are affecting. In addition, Anne Bruun Rovsing and colleagues will investigate how lithium treatment, which alleviates symptoms for 30% of patients, affects these genetic variants and their target genes. By using statistical methods, the project aims to pinpoint the most plausible causal variants, and then directly mimic these variants in large-scale CRISPR screens in cortical neurons and investigate the effect on gene expression using single-cell sequencing methods.
This project will identify specific genetic variants highly correlated with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and the genes they affect, and it will discover how lithium treatment affects these variants and their target genes. This will help predict lithium treatment response for patients carrying these genetic variants, discover novel treatment targets, and unravel biological mechanisms underlying disease.
