Develop a quantitative biological approach to the understanding and classification of neuropsychiatric diseases
The overall objective of this project is to develop a quantitative biological approach to the understanding and classification of neuropsychiatric diseases to accelerate the discovery and development of better treatments for patients. The concept is to define a set of quantifiable biological parameters for social withdrawal and cognitive deficits to cluster and differentiate schizophrenia (SZ), Alzheimer’s disease (AD), and to a lesser degree, patients with major depressive disorder (MD).
The following specific objectives will be addressed:
- Proof-of-concept analyses to cluster and differentiate SZ and AD patients on the basis of quantitative biological parameters.
- Explore dimensional relationships between pathology (e.g., cognitive deficits) and social withdrawal.
- Develop a deeper understanding of the quantitative biology of social withdrawal using clinical data from SZ, AD and MD patients and by establishing a network of pre-clinical research sites able to perform high quality back-translation studies.
- Develop the regulatory path for social withdrawal across disorders.
