Project description
A genetic blueprint for mental illness risk
Serious mental illness (SMI) has devastating effects, but preventing it hinges on early diagnosis. This involves identifying individuals at risk before symptoms fully emerge. Current clinical methods are suboptimal, relying only on basic characteristics and often ignoring the risk for non-psychotic SMI disorders such as major depression and bipolar disorder. The ERC-funded PersonalRiskProfile project aims to develop a personalised genetic risk profile (PGRP) software. It will be the first of its kind. Using advanced genetic techniques, it will compute an individual’s risk for multiple SMI disorders. The team will optimise prediction by incorporating subtle polygenic risk scores and rare genetic variants. The PGRP will be validated in clinical cohorts and presented via an intuitive online dashboard.
Objective
Serious mental illness (SMI) has devastating effects. The key clinical challenge is to identify individuals at increased risk for SMI for personalized prevention. However, the specialized clinical teams aiming to identify at-risk individuals face major challenges: risk assessment is suboptimal as only clinical characteristics are considered, and only psychosis is considered ignoring risk for SMI disorders without psychosis.
Genetics has great potential to significantly improve identification of at-risk individuals. However, the major current problem preventing clinical implementation is that no appropriate method exists to accurately assess genetic risk of multiple SMI disorders.
In this ambitious PersonalRiskProfile-project, my team and I will develop this much-needed method and software: the personalized genetic risk profile (PGRP)-method. PGRP will use advanced genetic techniques to simultaneously compute the risk for multiple SMI disorders that regularly but not always include psychosis: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder. Specifically, we aim to Optimize Prediction & Generalize to Diverse Ancestries (Aim 1), by including polygenic risk scores for SMI-disorders and auxiliary helper-traits, including rare genetic variants, and accounting for time-since-risk-assessment effects and family information; and to Validate & Prepare for Implementation (Aim 2), by validating PGRP in clinical cohorts, determining the best strategy to integrate PGRP with clinical risk assessment, investigating the stakeholders’ perspective, and developing an Online Dashboard to intuitively present PGRP-results.
This ambitious interdisciplinary project provides a key step towards personalized prevention using genetics. I am uniquely qualified to lead, having established myself as international expert in statistical genetics through development of high-impact innovative methods and prestigious fellowships, combined with my clinical expertise as psychiatrist.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) ERC-2025-STG
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1081 HV Amsterdam
Netherlands
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