The South Texas Diabetes and Obesity Institute (STDOI) at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) www.utrgv.edu received an award for $4 million from the National Institute of Mental Health www.nimb.nih.gov to do a four year project to search for genes influencing psychiatric disorders including schizophrenia, bipolar disorders, and major depression.
According to Dr. John Blangero, Director of the Genomics Computing Center at the STDOI and Interim Director of Neurosciences at the UTRGV School of Medicine www.utrgv.edu/en-us/utrgv-medical-school, “Psychiatric diseases are major public health burdens with a global economic cost approaching $100 million per day. The biological causes of these mental disorders remain poorly understood which limits the range of available treatments.”
The project involves sequencing the entire genomes of more than 2,000 individuals in families with these disorders. The sequence data contains information on more than 3 billion DNA base pairs for each individual. The analyses will be performed on the new 1,000 processor, high performance computer cluster named Medusa.
Blangero and colleagues at STDOI will use advanced statistical methods to search the genomes for genes to study the variation in disease risk within and between families. The families were sampled from around the world and include participants from South Texas, Pennsylvania, Australia, Costa Rica, and Scotland.
In addition, the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UTHSCSA) www.uthscsa.edu one of seven organizations as announced by Methodist Healthcare Ministries of South Texas Inc. (MHM) www.mhm.org will take part in a program to support a healthy South Texas.
UTHSCA will receive $846,530 over two years with a match possibility that could bring the total to $1,693,060. The funding is part of a $12 million investment made by MHM. Although the School of Medicine at UTHSCSA http://som.uthsca.edu applied for the grant and will initially receive the funding, this program will be transitioned to UTRGV as of September 1, 2015.
The purpose of this grant is to increase access to care and implement an integrated behavioral health model to prepare young physicians to think about the healthcare of tomorrow as an integrated, inter-professional endeavor. The team will implement both onsite and offsite training to help both programs improve their abilities to offer integrated behavioral healthcare to local residents.