Severe Mental Illness:
From Genetics to Translational Biology

This two-day symposium, chaired by Dr. Steve Hyman, Director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute and Dr. Guoping Feng of McGovern Institute at MIT, and Director of the Neurobiology and Model Systems group of the Stanley Center, will bring together leading scientists working on the genetics and neurobiology of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism and related neuropsychiatric disorders, with scientists working on translating these genetic findings to effective therapeutics for said diseases.

The illnesses highlighted in this symposium cause lifelong disability to millions of persons – combined, more than 3% of the world population are affected by one of these severe disorders. This is an exciting moment in the science, as results continue to emerge from large-scale genetics studies and continue to reveal shared and unshared risk factors across multiple disorders, and, more importantly, are beginning to coalesce around molecular mechanisms underlying these diseases. In the coming years neuroscientists will be increasingly able to put the emerging genetics to work in the service of new understandings of pathophysiology, the development of biomarkers, and much-needed new treatments. We hope, particularly, to attract graduate students and postdoctoral associates to this symposium in order to build this interdisciplinary field at a time of great opportunity.

Agenda

Day 1

Monday, September 28, 2015

8:00 – 8:45	Breakfast
8:45 – 9:00	Welcome by Steve Hyman

Session 1: Recent Advances in Genetics Chair: Aarno Palotie
9:00 – 9:30	Mark Daly GWAS and exome sequencing: first footholds in biology of schizophrenia and autism
9:30 – 10:00	Ben Neale Mapping genetic risk factors for psychiatric disease across the allele frequency spectrum
10:00 – 10:30	Naomi Wray Pointers and Pitfalls from Playing with Polygenicity
10:30 – 10:50	Coffee Break

10:50 – 11:20	Pamela Sklar TBD
11:20 – 11:50	Preben Bo Mortensen iPSYCH: psychiatric genetics with an epidemiological twist
12:00 – 1:00	Lunch

Session 2: Translational Neuroscience Chair: Kasper Lage
2A. New enabling technologies
1:00 – 1:30	Evan Macosko Mammalian brain gene expression at single-cell resolution
1:30 – 2:00	Wade Harper Applying quantitative proteomics to understand variation in iPS cell proteomes
2:00 – 2:30	Rick Huganir Schizophrenia risk genes and synapse development
2:30 – 2:45	Coffee Break

2B. Neuro– immune interactions
2:45 – 3:15	Steve McCarroll Schizophrenia, complement, microglia: Unraveling schizophrenia’s relationship with the MHC locus
3:15 – 3:45	Beth Stevens Immune Mechanisms of Synaptic Pruning in Development & Disease
3:45 – 4:15	Betty Diamond Antibodies as mediators of brain pathology
4:15 – 4:30	Coffee Break

Session 3: Clinical Applications – The schizophrenia prodrome Chair: Alysa Doyle
4:30 – 5:00	Raquel Gur Brain-Behavior Phenotypes in at-Risk Youth
5:00 – 5:30	Pat McGorry Towards stepwise and personalised intervention for emerging mental illness in young people
5:30 – 6:00	Sophia Vinogradov Neuroscience-informed cognitive training for impaired neural systems in schizophrenia
6:30	Poster session, reception and dinner buffet

Day 2

Tuesday, September 29, 2015

8:15 – 9:00	Breakfast

Session 4: Translatable phenotypes

4A. Cellular phenotypes Chair: Paola Arlotta
9:00 – 9:30	Paola Arlotta From cortical development to cortex in the dish: modeling neurodevelopmental disease
9:30 – 10:00	Kevin Eggan A prototype human excitatory neuron for the study of psychiatric disease
10:00 – 10:30	Arnold Kriegstein Molecular insights into the role of neural stem and progenitor cells in human cortical expansion
10:30 – 11:00	Coffee Break
11:00 – 11:30	Gord Fishell The candidate ASD gene RBfox1 mediates the maturation and synapse formation of specific interneuron subtypes
11:30 – 12:00	Lee Rubin Why do Motor Neurons Die in Spinal Muscular Atrophy?

Short talks selected from submitted abstracts
12:00 – 12:15	Short talk 1
12:15 – 12:30	Short talk 2
12:30 – 1:30	Lunch

4B. In vivo phenotypes Chair: Bob Desimone
1:30 – 2:00	Will Spooren EU-AIMS: an ambitious autism research network in Europe
2:00 – 2:30	Alan Anticevic Towards Translational Neuroimaging Biomarkers for Severe Mental Illness
2:30 – 3:00	Bernardo Sabatini GABAergic identity of cholinergic neurons
3:00 – 3:30	Guoping Feng TRN dysfunction in neurodevelopmental disorders
3:30 – 4:00	Erika Sasaki The perspective of genetically modified non-human primate models for mental disease
4:00 – 4:30	Coffee Break

4:30 – 5:15	Panel discussion- future directions on research and funding Chair: Guoping Feng
	Anjene Addington, NIMH Thomas Lehner, NIMH Louis Reichardt, Simons Foundation Sarah Caddick, Gatsby Foundation Stacie Weninger, Fidelity Steve Hyman Ed Scolnick Mark Daly Tom Insel, NIMH
5:15 – 5:30	Concluding remarks Steve Hyman