Speeding the Search for Bipolar Genes
Depression Center, Johns Hopkins join forces to increase sample size
For the 5.7 million Americans with bipolar disorder, the manic “highs” and the deep depressed “lows” they experience are bad enough. But they also live with the knowledge that their loved ones, especially their children, are at risk of developing the disease. Although no single gene causes bipolar disorder, the disease has its roots in genetic vulnerabilities that run in families.
A new cooperative effort by scientists at the U-M Depression Center and Johns Hopkins University will accelerate the search for these genetic underpinnings of the disease. The two universities are combining research efforts and stockpiles of biological samples from bipolar patients and their families. The sample collection also will be available to other researchers who study the genetics of bipolar disorder.
The U-M/Hopkins collaboration will expand the Prechter Bipolar Genetics Repository, which has been used by U-M researchers and colleagues at Stanford University and Cornell University since 2005. The repository is funded by the U-M Heinz C. Prechter Bipolar Research Fund, founded by Waltraud “Wally” Prechter in an ongoing effort to conquer the disease that led to her husband’s suicide in 2001.
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| Robert Thompson, Ph.D. (left), an assistant professor of psychiatry and research assistant professor in the Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience Institute, manages the laboratory for the Prechter Bipolar Genetics Repository. Thompson works closely with Melvin McInnis, seen here holding a DNA microarray slide containing small points of genetic variation called single nucleotide polymorphisms in human DNA. Modern laboratory analytical systems like the ones in Thompson's lab are helping scientists identify genes that may predispose people to bipolar disorder. Photo: Martin Vloet |
“Cooperation means acceleration in genetics research, because the more samples we can study from more families, the faster we can get to definitive answers about the genes involved in bipolar,” says Melvin McInnis, M.D., the Upjohn Woodworth Professor of Bipolar Disorder and Depression in the U-M Medical School Department of Psychiatry, and director of Depression Center psychiatry programs.
McInnis and his colleagues have used genetic scans to identify a particular region of chromosome 8, which appears to contain areas of major variation between people with bipolar disorder and those without the disease. Now, the combined genetic repository will allow scientists to narrow their search for the genes and individual nucleotides that lie at the heart of that variation.
More than 1,500 blood and cell samples from 140 families affected by bipolar disorder are being shipped from the Hopkins campus in Baltimore, Maryland, to be stored with hundreds of samples collected since 2005 by U-M researchers. The Hopkins repository includes samples collected since the late 1980s. U-M scientists will prepare DNA samples from the Hopkins blood and cell samples, which then will be studied at both institutions.
U-M researchers will continue adding new samples from additional patients and their relatives to the repository.
For more information on the Prechter Bipolar Genetics Repository, and the need for more patients and families to volunteer samples of their blood and DNA, call (877) 864-3637 or e-mail bpresearch@umich.edu.
—Kara Gavin
Source: Medicine at Michigan Spring 2007