Los Angeles (CNS) -- A UCLA scientist has been awarded a $3.8 million grant to fund ``radical'' new research that could improve the diagnosis and treatment of schizophrenic patients.
The National Institute of Mental Health awarded the grant on Thursday to Roel A. Ophoff, an assistant professor of human genetics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
Ophoff will lead a four-year genetic study of schizophrenia in collaboration with scientists from the University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands.
Together, they will analyze the complete human genome -- the full set of human genes -- to help pinpoint those related to schizophrenia.
The joint project, which will study about 850 Dutch schizophrenia patients and 750 control subjects, is among the first of its kind.
``This genome-wide study is a radical departure from previous disease- association research, which focused on a single gene or a limited number of positions on the chromosome based on a small sample,'' said Ophoff, a researcher at UCLA's Center for Neurobehavioral Genetics of the Jane and Terry Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior.
``Our approach will enable us to separate false clues from the real genes and chromosome positions associated with schizophrenia,'' Ophoff said. ``Once we identify the true genetic variants for the disease, we will be able to expand the study from Europeans to other ethnic populations.''
Deciphering the disorder's genetic basis will benefit patients by improving diagnosis and potentially point to new and better therapies to treat schizophrenia, Ophoff said.
UCLA will create a database to make the study's DNA and clinical data available for future use by the scientific community.
The large-scale genotyping will be performed at the high-volume facility of the Southern California Genotyping Consortium at UCLA.
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