Medical Neuroscience Cluster

Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy and Department of Molecular Neurosciences
Medical University of Vienna

Prof. Dr. Rupert Lanzenberger and Prof. Dr. Siegfried Kasper
Prof. Dr. Tibor Harkany and Mr. Evgenii O. Tretiakov

Abstract
Treatment-resistant depression (TRD) is a significant clinical problem because of the longevity, severity and prevalence of this subtype of depression, with no effective medication available at present. A European cohort study combining clinical and genetic means have committed to interrogating genetic parameters that might be causal for TRD. However, individual genes returned weak associations to clinical parameters. Recent advances in multi-OMIC analysis conceptually advanced towards the computational interrogation of broad gene sets functionally clustered into gene regulatory networks (GRNs). By now, GRNs are seen as causal genetic determinants of specific cellular functions. Yet, GRN associations with TRD have not been performed. This application brings together clinical and computational expertise in offering nothing less than an entirely new approach to assess the genomic landscape of TRD and to identify druggable targets by pinpointing critical loci in GRNs that could determine phenotypic severity and druggability.