United States / Bipolar Disorder Category
Title of Winning Proposal: “PhenoChipping of psychotic disorders: phenotype to genotype integration”
Dr. Alexander B. Niculescu has been trained as both a clinician and a basic researcher, at Scripps Research Institute and UC San Diego, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at Indiana University School of Medicine. He is interested in translational research approaches to understanding psychiatric disorders.
He has developed an approach, termed Convergent Functional Genomics (CFG), for identifying candidate genes, pathways and mechanisms for neuropsychiatric disorders. The approach is based on the integration of gene expression profiling in pharmacogenomic animal models of the illness with human genetic linkage studies and other lines of evidence. His lab has applied this approach to bipolar and related disorders, and is currently engaged in pursuing collaborative studies using this approach in schizophrenia and alcohol abuse. Dr. Niculescu is particularly interested in circadian clock genes as candidate genes for cycling and switching in bipolar disorders.
Another line of work in his lab involves the study of phenotypes- phenomics. The imprecise nature of psychiatric phenotypes has been a rate-limiting step for clinical research and practice in general, and for psychiatric genetics in particular. Dr. Niculescu is developing an approach, termed PhenoChipping, that applies microarray paradigms and methodology to the empirical study of phenotypes. He is particularly interested in building a bank of blood samples from the subjects that are PhenoChipped, for repeated mining by studies integrating genetic and genomics with phenomics.
