Lieber Institute for Brain Development shares grant to study origins of schizophrenia
The Lieber Institute for Brain Development (LIBD) announces the award of a $10.5 million NIH grant to further its efforts to identify the causes of schizophrenia and other neurodevelopmental disorders that will guide development of more precise and effective treatments. From a large and highly competitive applicant pool, the joint LIBD/University of Michigan/Salk Institute proposal was rated the highest and selected for funding this week.
Lack of vitamin D during pregnancy. Send me the 10 million to my Swiss bank account, don’t send it in the post as sometimes my Amazon deliveries go missing.
I =luv= it when epigenetics (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics) get $10 million. Call me a harpie, but I’ve been screeching about the topic to whoever will listen ever since Alan Schore, Dan Stern and others proposed that the infant’s unfinished brain is affected by all manner of circumstances during further (but still relatively early) mitotic cell division about fifteen years ago. (Frank Lake was onto the rudiments of it 40 years ago in his work on the maternal-fetal stress syndrome.)
In general, the younger the brain, the more neuroplastic – at the way-down-there level of DNA-RNA “bubbling” – it is, in no small part owing to stress-driven changes in DNA-RNA conversions. We know (or strongly suspect) it’s there in a bunch of other ostensibly “genetic” etiologies, so why not sz?
This is a huge opportunity to get over the hump of the nature vs. nurture controversy… if the drug companies will get out of the way.