Scientific Accomplishments

The Pritzker Consortium has made several significant discoveries of relevance to the translational approach to discover biomarkers and novel targets for the treatment of psychiatric disorders. These have been described in a series of scientific publications that have arisen from the Consortium. One example is the discovery that the Fibroblast Growth Factor (FGF) Family is significantly altered in severe depression and the subsequent work demonstrating that FGF2 does indeed play a role in emotional behavior, and that early life injection of FGF2 can protect animals that are genetically vulnerable to anxiety from becoming anxious in adulthood. Many other genes and molecular pathways have been implicated in each of the disorders. Some advances have focused on characterizing the normal brain and on refining the technologies needed to study human material for genome-wide analyses.