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Psychiatric disorders pose an enormous economic burden to society. In Denmark, the cumulative incidence rate of any psychiatric disorder at 18 years of age is a staggering 15%. Schizophrenia is one of the major psychiatric disorders and has only limited ways of treatment, with current drugs being unspecific, unable to target all major symptoms, and many patients are treatment resistant and suffer from medication side effects.

Recent genetics and epidemiological studies revealed a growing number of risk factors associated with schizophrenia. However, the discovery of these factors has not yet led to better understanding of mechanisms underlying the development of schizophrenia. Our consortium will capitalize on known schizophrenia risk factors and implement cutting-edge technologies for high-throughput exploration of the role of schizophrenia risk factors in animal models and in human brain organoids. Using this approach, we will determine how schizophrenia-associated brain dysfunctions arise during brain development and why symptoms manifest much later in life during adolescence. Finally, we will identify why risk factors induce brain dysfunction in some individuals, whereas others are resilient to the risk factor effects. These resilience mechanisms can be stimulated in the patients as a novel future therapeutical approach in psychiatric disorders.

Our team is made of experts with complementary expertise allowing to carry out a highly multi-disciplinary approach: single-cell omics, computation, and brain development (Prof. Konstantin Khodosevich, Copenhagen), high-resolution proteomics and protein-protein networks (Prof. Alicia Lundby, Copenhagen), human cellular modelling and clinical psychiatry (Assoc. Prof. Carl Sellgren, Stockholm), and animal modelling and behavior (Prof. Urs Meyer, Zürich).