Misón Origen
Latin American descended populations are poorly represented in psychiatric genetics research. Through Misión Origen, we are creating a biobank for Severe Mental Illness, consisting of 50,000 participants with severe mental illness and 50,000 population controls from the Paisa region of Colombia. All phenotyping will be through electronic medical records.
Co-led by Loes Olde Loohuis, Carlos Lopez Jaramillo, and Nelson Freimer. Funded by NIMH. For some of our ongoing work in this population, see: Service et al. 2020, Lancet Psychiatry and Mooney et al. 2018, American Journal of Human Genetics
Promotional video
Website (in Spanish)
PUMAS
The Populations Underrepresented in Mental illness Association Studies (PUMAS) Project, is a recently formed international collaboration of investigators from the US, South America and Africa which aims to collect samples from 17,000 individuals with severe mental illness from across Africa and the Americas to create a total sample dataset from 183,000 participants. We will generate and analyze whole genome sequencing data on 40,000 schizophrenia patients, 40,000 bipolar patients and 40,000 controls to learn the similarities and differences of the genetic architecture of severe mental illness across diverse ancestries and environments.
U01 awarded by the NIMH to the Broad Institute, Harvard, SUNY Downstate and UCLA.